Running Off At The Keyboard

The Holy See has recognized the Community of the Beatitudes (http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=30783) as a new ecclesial community arising out of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The organization will be an "international private association of faithful of pontifical right with juridical personality." Whatever that is. Founder of the organization, dedicated to contemplative and missionary work, is Ephraim Croissant, a former French Protestant pastor who converted to Catholicism, together with his wife, Josette, and another couple not mentioned in the article. The group will encompass lay, consecrated, and ordained members and families who live in community. It is active in 32 countries including North America. Associated with the Community of the Beatitudes is a community known as Family of the Beatitudes. These ecclesial communities seem to be the Pope's response to disintegrating Catholicism at the parish level. The main ones are Communion and Liberation, Neocatechumenal Way, Focolare and Opus Dei. These organizations have generated many other groups with different names. There must be hundreds of them. Indications are that they frequently divide parishes when they become directly involved at the parish level. Not all of them work in parishes, however. They seem to place great importance on every word of their founder. For the most part, they are a mystery to the laity who do not belong to them.

I've been noticing in recent days that the message against the war coming from the Vatican is getting stronger and stronger. Today this article appears indicating the greatest opposition yet. From the article: VATICAN, Jan 30, 03 (CWNews.com) -- The Vatican's Secretary of State has expressed clear opposition to a military strike on Iraq, in the strongest language yet used by a Vatican official. "We are against the war," Cardinal Angelo Sodano told a group of Italian journalists. He added that whatever arguments might be made about a "pre-emptive strike" on Iraq, "it is certainly not a defensive war." In his remarks, Cardinal Sodano advanced a view which would represent a major new development in Church teaching, questioning whether warfare could ever be justified under current circumstances. >> The objection seems to be strongly enough worded that the issue of conscientious objection must be raised. Can a Catholic soldier fight in this war? Is refusal grounded in the Vatican pronouncements legitimate? I don't have an answer, but it bears considering.

There is an interesting editorial in CHRISTIAN ORDER Magazine, a British Catholic (in communion with the pope) publication which evaluates Vatican II from the traditional perspective. The opening paragraphs are pasted below. From the website: VATICAN II IN THE DOCK THE EDITOR A recent article in the New York Times about the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the Church commented matter-of-factly: "The Council's documents, shaped by the bishops and their theological advisers in four two-month sessions held each fall from 1962 through 1965, offer more than enough compromises and ambiguities for conflicting interpretations." There is no doubt about it. As the most verbose Council in the history of the Church by at least a factor of six, it is the sheer volume of words that smothers a plain interpretation of many Vatican II documents, providing support both for a novel and a traditional meaning. "The council�s lack of precision," writes Professor Romano Amerio, a pre-eminent Conciliar analyst who worked as a peritus on the draft schemas to be discussed at Vatican II, "is admitted even by those theologians most faithful to the Roman See, who attempt to acquit the council of blame in the matter. But it is obvious that the need to defend the univocal meaning of the council is itself an indication of its equivocal character." It must be stated from the outset, however, that this damning assessment is also why the ultra-sceptics are wrong to suggest that the Holy Spirit took an extended holiday from 1962-65. On the contrary, while He may not have inspired Vatican II, the Holy Spirit remained on duty the whole time, working flat out to save the Council from itself and its own verbiage! Often it was a close run thing, too, relying on last minute insertions of vital footnotes in order to keep a text, however tenuously, Catholic. Attempting "to acquit the council of blame" in all of this simply will not do. There are facts to be faced, judgements to be made and blame to be directly apportioned. To begin with, it is a fact that those infamous ambiguities and loopholes found their way into the Council documents thanks to the disproportionate influence of a coterie of renowned Modernist theologians - Chenu, Kung, Schillebeeckx, Congar, Danielou, Rahner, de Lubac, Ratzinger and the rest. Each previously suspect or condemned by the Vatican - and all implicitly condemned by Pius XII�s 1950 Encyclical Humani Generis - they were conveniently rehabilitated for the occasion and called to Rome by John XXIII. "Fr. de Lubac later told me," recalled Yves Congar, "that it was John XXIII himself who had insisted that we both become members of this commission [that prepared the Council]." Subsequently lauded and supported by their patron Paul VI (who as Cardinal Archbishop of Milan had led the Modernist faction of the Sacred College together with notorious prelates like Konig, Suenens, Fring and Lienart), and openly admired and encouraged by other influential players at the Council including Msgr Karol Wojtyla, these exponents of the Nouvelle Theologie, as comprehensively documented in studies such as Animus Delendi - I, Iota Unum and The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, "laid the foundation of conciliar doctrine and applied it with the open support of the highest echelons of the Conciliar Church." As if entrusting the preparation of Council documents to heretics like Kung, Schillebeeckx and Rahner was not sensational enough, however, we also know that they and their "progressive" colleagues counted among their ranks an unknown number of high level infiltrators. This shocking reality was once again raised in the summer 2001 edition of the Latin Mass Magazine, when no less a personage than Dr. Alice von Hildebrand recalled during an interview that "Bella Dodd told my husband and me that when she was an active [Communist] party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican 'who were working for us'." And that was some 20 years before Vatican II! We can only guess at the number of Communist (and Masonic) "plants" who had risen to positions of influence in Rome and the ecclesiastical provinces by 1962 (� not to say 2003!). Brought back to the Church in 1952 by Bishop Fulton Sheen, Dodd testified before the House un-American Activities Committee that she was personally responsible for planting over 1,000 young men in Catholic seminaries with a view to destroying the Church from within. While another former Communist official, Manning Johnson, told the same Committee in 1953 that by "concentrating Communist agents in the seminaries" it was intended that "a small Communist minority [would] influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths conducive to Communist purposes." And he added: "This policy of infiltrating seminaries was successful beyond even our communist expectations." This remarkable history adds a far more sinister dimension to Archbishop Denis Hurley�s casual claim in the ensuing report that as one of the Teilhardian progressives at the Council he was part of "the conspiracy." In fact, as we can see, there were two types of conspiracy running in tandem. On the one hand the very natural conspiratio or "breathing together" of like-minded and largely sincere Modernist theologians who, by creating a rupture with the ecclesiastical past to parallel the great secular disruption of 1789, sought to bring the so-called �Church of the Counter-Reformation� to a close and create a new Church at ease with a pluralistic world - involving "radical alterations in the ways of thinking, feeling and living," as one of them put it. On the other, a dead-set conspiracy in the literal sense of the word by which a relatively small but powerful clique of Communist and Masonic ecclesiastics sought to influence Council proceedings in such a way as to help them shape the Church as a tool for their own nefarious ends. Apart from Archbishop Bugnini, who stands as living proof of the devastating Masonic influence, precisely which infiltrators at Vatican II doubled as egregious liberal theologians will remain a murky zone of endless speculation. Still, one can state that spooky arch-dissidents like Archbishop Hurley were, at the very least, part of the Modernist conspiratio - "useful idiots" aiding and abetting the real conspirators.

http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/page.cfm?objectid=12572675&method=full&siteid=50002 I didn't know Tolkien's son was a priest, let alone an abusive one! There are a lot more details at the website for anyone who is interested. Now if I just knew how to post the link, reading the whole story would be a lot easier! From the website: <>

# posted by Carrie : 12:01 PM

Aha! I think I've discovered the right sequence of clicks! There might just be hope for this thing!

Will this template work any better than the last two have worked? For some reason when I click Post & Publish in the tool bar, it posts but does not publish.