How Amoris Laetitia Precipitated Idolatry at the Pan-Amazonian Synod

by Jeff Tranzillo

In reading about Pope Francis’s response to Alexander Tschugguel’s throwing the Pachamama idols into the Tiber during the Pan-Amazonian Synod last month, I couldn’t help thinking how it echoes and confirms the inherent incoherence of Catholic moral revisionism, which the pope adopted in Amoris Laetitia (AL). The idols, he assured us, had been placed in the church of Transpontina “without idolatrous intentions.” We will unfold the implications of this telling statement herein.

To begin, let us recall that AL corrupted authoritative Church teaching on how to evaluate, or “discern,” the morality of a human act. The document subordinates due consideration of the deliberately chosen object of the will (e.g., adultery) to consideration of one’s personal intentions for choosing it in a given set of circumstances (e.g., the adulterous union will conduce to the good of the children involved). Quite simply, this means that one can do evil, in order that good might come of it (contrary to Rom 3:8). To put it another way, the subjective end that one wants to achieve justifies the concrete means that one willfully employs to achieve it.

Accordingly, AL suggests subtly that a good intention somehow transforms an objectively evil act into a good one, at least partially. The document sidesteps the fact that the deliberate choice to perpetrate an evil act indicates a radically disordered will, and that fallen man’s understanding of his own intentions is incomplete and fallible.

Given its false presuppositions, then, AL reduces the absolute, universally binding ordinances of the Decalogue to “general rules” that “cannot provide absolutely for all particular situations” (AL, 304). In fact, individuals might even “discern” that observing these ordinances in their own “concrete situations” would result in more sin than their not observing them (AL, 301). This is all tantamount to AL’s denying the existence of acts that are, by their very nature, intrinsically evil in every time, place, and circumstance, regardless of how good one’s intentions might be in performing them.

AL is then poised to tell us that the very acts that God has clearly and absolutely proscribed as detrimental to the true temporal and eternal good of every human being can contain “constructive elements” (AL, 292, 298), which serve as “paths of sanctification that give glory to God” (AL, 305). Assuaging right reason and conscience amid this flagrant opposition between divine revelation and Francis’s “pastoral” take on grave sin requires something more than just the demotion of the Decalogue’s ordinances to a conditional (and, inexorably, a provisional) status. It also requires the fabrication of a self-contradictory god–that is, of a false god, an idol. Accordingly, AL states that in violating the commandments of God amid “complex” circumstances, one can nevertheless arrive at “a certain moral security that [this] is what God himself is asking” (AL, 303).

Notice how AL has made the internal forum, conscience, the ultimate locus of divine revelation, rendering God’s public self-revelation in Israel’s history and in the divine Person of Jesus Christ superfluous, and ultimately meaningless. This frees the document to ignore any scriptural passage that confutes it, such as, “The eyes of the Lord are on those who fear Him, and He knows every deed of man. He has not commanded anyone to be ungodly, and He has not given anyone permission to sin” (Sir 15:19-20).

AL is thus waging a Modernist war on the one, living and true God, and on His revelation, replacing these with one’s own feelings, opinions, and subjective preferences, passed off as “conscience.” The idol here–the new deity–is therefore oneself. On awakening to this “divine” status, one has no further need of “discernment.” One can just do as one pleases, without recourse to any god beyond oneself.

Accordingly, AL charges the very persons who are mired in grave sin with the primary responsibility for discerning, in “conscience,” whether their objectively sinful actions are morally good or evil, based on their personal intentions and the “complexity” of their situations (AL, 37). Pastors trying to help them must base their own discernment of the situations on what these persons tell them.

In a word, the process of discernment, as presented in AL, is thoroughly subjective. The deck is stacked in favor of the sinner intent on sinning. “Discernment,” here, is just another word for the always nebulous, revisionist method of subjectively calculating “proportionate” reasons for deliberately doing evil. AL’s moral revisionism thus provides sinners with a handy excuse for enacting and persisting in grave sin.

But how, in practice, does Pope Francis apply his revisionist principles about discernment and conscience to persons striving to obey God’s commandments? The pope’s response to Alexander Tschugguel’s taking the Pachamamas out for a swim exhibits the same pattern of inconsistency and arbitrariness we’ve seen in him before.

Predictably, Francis did not follow the lead that he established in AL. He did not say that it was up to the young man to discern his intentions prayerfully, perhaps with pastoral help, and then to act in good conscience, given the concrete situation in which he found himself. Nor did Francis seem to entertain the possibility that, after prayerful discernment, Alexander might have arrived at “a certain moral security” that tossing the Pachamama statues into the Tiber was exactly what God was asking of him.

The pope should have declared, “‘Who am I to judge’ someone who is earnestly striving to do God’s will?” But it seems that his nonjudgmental approach is reserved only for those who rebel against God’s moral law, while being inapplicable to faithful Catholics who, by God’s grace, observe that law and grieve its violation.

In assessing the “concrete situation” before him, therefore, the pope attended exclusively to the objective, deliberate act that Alexander performed: Tschugguel took the Pachamamas out of the church and disposed of them. Francis didn’t bother considering what subjective or circumstantial factors might have been at play here. He simply judged the act itself as offensive, without regard to motive. So much for “discernment.” In this case, however, sound discernment would have been warranted, since, unlike idolatry, the object itself of Tschugguel’s action was not intrinsically evil, but, rightly evaluated, praiseworthy.

As for the allegedly offended parties, the pope did allow for discernment, but not as he presented it in AL. To be consistent, he would have had the idolators discern for themselves their intentions, and, consequently, why they should be offended at Tschuggel’s having disposed of their idols. Yet, without even having taken the time to “accompany” them, he presumed to “discern” for them that they had no idolatrous intentions, implying thereby that Alexander had no cause to take issue with their worship of the Pachamamas, or with the placement of these in a Catholic church.

Here, it seems that Francis regarded the objective acts of idol worship that took place, and the objective idol-status of the Pachamamas, as insignificant, giving pride of place, as in AL, to the “good” intentions of the idolaters–at least as he discerned them. It follows that Catholics should welcome, into their churches, idols placed there with good intentions, just as we should welcome, to Holy Communion, objectively grave sinners who intend only good by their sins.

In the Tschugguel case, the pope seemed concerned with the sensibilities only of the persons “offended” by the transfer of the idols from the church to the river. His disregard for the intrinsically evil nature of the idolatry itself that took place during the synod translated into an objective disregard for the persons scandalized by it.

Recourse to subjective intentions and to transitory circumstances in determining the morality of human acts, without duly regarding the object deliberately willed, leads inevitably to conflict, with those who do rightly regard the object, about whether the acts themselves are sources of moral good or evil. We are therefore faced with a battle for the soul of the Church and her members, as the insidious, purportedly “pastoral,” revisionist principles at work in AL proceed, swiftly and inexorably, to obliterate Catholic morality, so as to give place to idolatry and self-deification.

October 18, 2019December 27, 2019

Exchanging Truth for a Lie: The Pan-Amazonian Plan to Eliminate God, the Church, and Salvation

by Jeffrey Tranzillo

Now that the Pan-Amazon Synod is well underway in Rome, we should not be surprised at the strange and unsettling things that we are seeing and hearing in relation to it. The Pre-Synodal Instrumentum Laboris (hereafter IL) forewarned us quite candidly about the revolutionary direction the synod would take. In this essay, we will examine how it did so by looking, first, at the IL’s presentation of the native Amazonian “cosmovision,” and then at the bearing that this worldview has on three areas, namely, the Catholic Church, revelation and faith, and the identity and mission of Jesus Christ. By way of conclusion, I will recall and reflect on some of the main points that we will have covered, and I will also indicate what would ultimately be at stake if the Pan-Amazonian plan were ever to be fully implemented.

The Cosmic Vision of the Indigenous Amazonian Tribes

According to the IL, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon have an integral view of reality that encompasses human beings, life, territorial environment, ecology, and unseen spiritual forces. The Church and the world must therefore learn from them, before their idyllic, native way of life is ruined by the intrusion of Western culture, and by the Catholic doctrines and practices beholden to it.

The indigenous cosmic scheme sees human beings as “part of nature because we are water, air, earth and life of the environment created by God” (17). But this is not a simple case of materialistic reductionism, because in the native Amazonian worldview, “the material and spiritual dimensions cannot be disconnected” (13). This governing principle of indigenous life is reflected in the peoples’ “beliefs and rites regarding the actions of spirits, of the many-named divinity acting with and in the territory, with and in relation to nature” (25). Infused, as they are, with these “various spiritual forces” (13), trees and fish are really our brothers, and the flowers, birds, insects, larvae, and fungi are really our sisters (30).

It follows that “Mother Earth” in general, or the Amazon jungle in particular, is a living being–indeed, a personal (or multi-personal) being, since nature is endowed with rights (51), which pertain properly only to persons. “Good living,” therefore, means living in harmony with each other, with our territory, and with the creatures with whom we share it, since we are all connected by a divine-spiritual bond (12-13).

As a personal reality, nature bleeds and cries when abused. Abuse has been inflicted by the dominating neo-colonialist powers, which have imposed Western cultural, political, and economic models on the Amazon territory (17-18, 76, 103). “To abuse nature is to abuse the ancestors, the brothers and sisters, creation and the Creator” (26). By “Creator,” the IL means the “God Father-Mother Creator” (121), who becomes incarnate in the caresses of “soil, water, mountains: everything” (19). Given that the cosmos is thus shot through with divinity, we can understand why the IL tends to exhibit a “preferential option” for the poor earth, whose ecological plight it seems so often to place ahead of, or at least to identify with, the needs of the poor people it purports to represent.

Lost in the IL is the truth that the value of a single human being is incalculably greater, in God’s sight, than that of the earth, or of the universe itself, and that there are different grades of being among the creatures of the world, resulting in a hierarchy of value discernable to the human intellect. Instead, the IL levels the cosmic playing field completely, giving the false impression that all beings have fundamentally the same value.

We see this also in the IL’s concept of a salvific life, a “life full of God” (11). Here, the document is referring to the happy life manifest in the biological and cultural “diversity” of the Amazon, where the people, together with nature, sing a hymn to life, while dancing for joy. With the studied ambiguity that has become the touchstone of ecclesiastical output these days, the IL tells us that an integral life filled with such joyful effusions “represents divinity and our relationship with it.” In itself, this statement can be understood in an orthodox sense; however, we have seen that the IL is alluding to “the many-named divinity,” to the “spirits,” acting with and in nature (25).

At the very least, then, the document is extolling the animistic beliefs–the “cosmovision”–of the indigenous peoples, who see and dialogue with “the various spiritual forces” at work in nature, community life, and culture (13, 75). Because this vision does not properly distinguish between the material and the spiritual world, the IL has placed itself at the edge of pantheism, to say the least. As a result, its depiction of the Amazon’s “manifold expression of life” as “a mosaic of God” should give us pause (22).

The IL would have us believe that the indigenous Amazonian peoples are living in close harmony with “the supreme being” (12), fundamentally untouched by the consequences of original sin (such as concupiscence and the weakening of the intellect, now prone to err in both mundane and spiritual matters). This leaves us with the impression that for centuries prior to Western colonization and, with it, the arrival of European Christianity, the Amazonians were living blissfully, blamelessly, and harmoniously, communing “integrally” with one another and with nature and its “spirits.” Singing and dancing to the songs they learned from the rivers, life was just one big, festive celebration. We can picture the people skipping happily along eating berries–but not each other.

Cannibalism, fornication, adultery, polygamy, partible paternity, sodomy, incest, rape, superstition, sorcery, domestic and intertribal violence, human sacrifice–to these and other evils, the native tribes, as depicted in the IL, seem to have been wholly immune, never mind historical evidence to the contrary. Sadly, the IL leaves us wondering whether we can even consider these practices as evil at all. In the context of the whole–particularly given its embrace of cultural relativism, and its understanding of “pastoral sensitivity” and “pastoral conversion” (reflecting that of Amoris Laetitia)–the document can easily be taken to suggest that certain grave sins are merely manifestations of bio-social and cultural “diversity,” and not of moral perversity. Who are we to judge? The Church must simply welcome everyone unconditionally.

The Church in the IL

The only sins that the IL recognizes, it seems, are colonialism, neocolonialism, and a patriarchal mentality. On account of these, Western culture and structures have been imposed on indigenous Amazonian peoples deemed savage, or primitive, by greedy outsiders (76, 103, 117). These Western intruders have threatened the bio-social and cultural diversity of life in the Amazon. In the IL’s estimation, the Church has been complicit in this, having failed to appreciate the Amazonian peoples and their worldviews, while siding with the dominant powers (38, 111).

It seems, then, that the Church has, till now, managed to do little good for the indigenous tribes. She has consistently failed to broaden her own worldview by undergoing a thorough process of dialogical inculturation, which would have entailed learning indigenous languages and integrating indigenous wisdom, myths, cosmologies, religions, songs, dances, and stories into her own religious outlook and experience. Catholic missionaries must now redress this wrong, recognizing that they have nothing to offer by way of their own culture, education, and experience. Rather, they must “unlearn” all of these, as they immerse themselves in their adoptive culture (129 d, 3). Only then can they expect to help build “a Church with an indigenous and Amazonian face” (116).

What is more, the Catholic Church is called to a process of conversion to an integral ecology that recognizes the importance of the ecosystems to human life and relationships. This explains, above all else, why she must assimilate the “ancestral experience, cosmologies, spiritualities and theologies of the indigenous peoples in terms of care for our common home” (50). Salvaging indigenous myths and updating, or “inculturating,” community rites and celebrations will contribute to the process of ecological conversion (104 h). In addition, the Church must listen to the family songs of the native peoples, as these are expressions of prophecy in the Amazonian world (79 b).

Clearly, then, the Church has much to unlearn, as she discovers her identity through encounter with the original Amazonian peoples, learning and relearning from their wisdom and contemplation on our interconnectedness with the biome (40, 102). By inculturating the Gospel, based on her intercultural dialogue with the indigenous tribes amid the biological, religious, and cultural diversity of the Amazon region, the Church can look forward to a new Pentecost (30), as she takes on an Amazonian face. At the same time, she must abandon ideologies “hidden behind certain petrified doctrines” (38), which “reserve salvation exclusively for one’s own creed” (39). Only then will she come to appreciate other “pathways” to God, while ceasing with her efforts to apply “a monolithic body of doctrine” to “a pluri-ethnic, pluri-cultural, and pluri-religious world” (36, 110).

Once the Church has discarded “rigid [doctrinal, moral, and disciplinary] positions that do not take sufficient account of the concrete life of the people and the pastoral reality,” she will be able “to meet the real needs of indigenous peoples and cultures” (119 d; italics added). Since the native peoples of the Amazon “have a pronounced sense of community, equality and solidarity” (127), moreover, the Church should “rethink” her organizational structure (135 d), so as to “recreate ministries appropriate to this historical moment” (43).

IL Proposals for the Church’s Amazonian Facelift

Among other things, the Church’s governing, judicial, and sacramental authority could be shared, on a rotational basis, with persons other than those who have received the sacrament Holy Orders (127). Official ministries could be conferred on women (129 a, 3), and women could be given guaranteed leadership and decision-making opportunities, with the hope that the Church adopts an increasingly feminine way of acting, and of interpreting events (129 c, 2-4). Changes could also be made in the criteria for selecting and preparing ministers authorized to celebrate the Eucharist (126 c). Perhaps older indigenous people (including women?) could be ordained to the priesthood, even if they are already married and have a family (129 a, 2).

As regards the Church’s liturgy and sacraments, these must be inculturated by incorporating into them “the rites, symbols, and styles of celebration of indigenous cultures in contact with nature” (126 a). In this way, the celebration of the faith will become “an expression of one’s own religious experience and a bond of communion in the celebrating community” (125). With that in mind, the IL encourages the Amazonian Episcopal Conferences to “adapt the Eucharistic ritual to their cultures” (126 d). The recent trend toward “a ‘sound decentralization’ of the Church” would presumably place this action within the competence of the regional bishops. Father Francisco Taborda, S.J., a Brazilian priest and theologian, has suggested, as a possibility, that yuca, a common Latin American staple food, replace wheat as the matter used for the bread consecrated during Mass.This would be more practical for the native peoples, and also more meaningful to them symbolically.

The Eucharist, together with the other inculturated sacraments, “should be a source of life and a remedy accessible to all” (126 b), bar no one (79 d, ii). This requires “a pastoral sensitivity that accompanies and integrates” (126, b), as opposed to “the rigidity of a discipline that excludes and alienates.” Having the largest possible number of people participating in these culturally reconfigured sacramental rites certainly seems to make good sense, when we consider that “indigenous rituals and ceremonies are essential for integral health”; that is, “they create harmony and balance between human beings and the cosmos,” thus curing diseases and protecting from evils (87). It follows that the more people involved, the more efficacious the sacraments will be. While it is easy to imagine how sacramental rites inculturated according to indigenous ways of life might have a cohesive effect on the local community, it is a little hard to understand how these custom-made, invalid sacraments would conduce to the unity of the Church as a whole.

The IL responds that the reality of the local Amazonian churches requires “a welcoming Church hospitable to cultural, social and ecological diversity,” so that it can “serve individuals or groups without discrimination” (112). The Church must recognize, as the IL’s authors seem to, that “the Creator Spirit . . . is the one that has nurtured the spirituality of these peoples for centuries” (120), even before the Gospel was ever proclaimed to them. That same Spirit moves them to accept the Gospel according to their own cultural and traditional ways of life and understanding. This demands the conclusion that the Church must adopt, as her supreme principle for establishing universal ecclesial unity, the willingness to embrace bio-social, religious, and cultural diversity. It is only by an exchange of experiential wisdom through intercultural dialogue, followed by the inculturation of her beliefs and practices, that the Church grows in the truth and discovers who she is.

Accordingly, the IL urges the Church to become a “Samaritan Church” (43, 5). By this designation, the document signifies, not just a Church that goes out to help those in need (115; Lk 10:25-36), but also one whose own, true religion has become adulterated (the IL would say “enriched”) by the (false) religious beliefs of others, as was the case with the partly Hebrew Samaritans of old (see Jn 4:20-22, which IL 36 conveniently ignores). The IL is therefore advocating for religious syncretism, expecting that the Church should paganize the faith and the sacraments that she has received personally from Jesus Christ, true God and true man, through the Apostles. This process of paganization–together with its implicit denial that the man Jesus is Himself truly God–is supposed to make the Church’s patrimony relevant to everyone.

This is consistent with the IL’s denying, explicitly and acerbically, that the Church is the guardian of an unchanging, universally applicable deposit of faith (110). It also entails denying that she possesses and dispenses the vehicles of grace by which one enters and deepens one’s personal communion with God Himself. Instead, the IL’s primary concern is to articulate the Church’s role in saving the environment from neo-colonialist exploitation, and in restoring pagan culture–becoming pagan herself in the process. That the Church has a divine commission to save souls from eternal damnation, and that she has been divinely constituted for this purpose, is not even on the IL’s radar screen.

The IL’s Ecological Diversion

Even as we grant the seriousness of reckless, self-interested attacks on environmental life, the IL mentions certain situations that, being more directly personal, reasonable minds recognize as far more grave and urgent: sexual exploitation, human trafficking, drug trafficking and consumption, and cultural conflicts (73). But what solutions does the document propose for these and other social ills, which are now taking such an immediate and incalculably huge human toll? Among other things, it suggests that we: “promote environmental awareness, recycling of garbage, and avoidance of burning; promote a system of environmental sanitation and universal access to health; create spaces for interaction between the wisdom of the indigenous . . . peoples in urban settings and the wisdom of the urban population” (74). The utter blindness, inanity, and callousness of the IL’s authors here is simply beyond belief.

It may be true that “attacks against [ecological] life in the Amazon territory” cause “serious problems” (44), such as the destruction of land, deforestation, and pollution (46). But heeding the IL’s call for “an integral ecological conversion” through intercultural dialogue with the aboriginal communities is not going to solve these problems (49). At best, it would merely divert our attention from their root cause. Attacks of the ecological kind, or any other, issue from hearts unconverted to God.

At the same time, the fact that some people do not perpetrate ecological or certain other kinds of serious abuse does not necessarily signify that their hearts are converted to God. This seems lost on the IL’s authors, who seem to identify an ecologically sensitive heart with a godly heart–a heart attuned to the “revelation,” or “epiphany,” of God in nature (19). Again, this suggests a pantheistic outlook.

Revelation and Faith in the IL

Every once in a while, the IL throws us an orthodox-sounding bone, such as “Jesus is the fullness of all revelation” (11). In the context of Dei Verbum, 2, from which this quotation is taken, “revelation” refers specifically to biblical revelation, to God’s making known to us in history, by words and deeds, “the hidden purpose of His will,” namely, that we should become partakers in the divine nature through Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. This is the call and the salvation of every human being. Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, is the eternal Mediator and fulfillment of this revelation. In Him, the eternal Father has left nothing unsaid. No one is saved except through Him, the eternal Son of the Father.

In revealing Himself to us historically, God has interpreted Himself for us infallibly, for He can neither deceive nor be deceived (Vatican I, Dei Filius, 3). Since Christ’s coming, the Church preserves and elaborates on that revelation by means of the divinely inspired Scriptures, sacred Tradition, and the Church’s extraordinary or ordinary-and-universal magisterium, guided by the Holy Spirit. Everything pertaining to this revelation, and to the process by which it is preserved, interpreted, and transmitted, is therefore supernatural.

When it comes to the “Book of Nature” (that is, to the testimony of creation), however, human beings interpret (or intuit) God through the things He has made. This is, indeed, possible to a modest extent, for “the heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands” (Ps 19:1). In other words, creation is a sort of revelation, by which we make deductions about God as the Ultimate Cause of the effect. The process of interpretation is, in this case, grounded naturally in the human intellect. But without the corrective of the Church’s teaching (based on Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium), human beings will invariably fall short or err when they use unaided reason to interpret God, themselves, the world, and the relations between them. This is true especially because the human intellect has become weakened by the fall and clouded by personal sin (Wis 13:1-9; Rom 1:20-25).

Concupiscence and sin incline us to rebel against inconvenient truths, especially those concerning the meaning, the purpose, and the moral boundaries of human nature and its faculties. In turn, our war on truth invites our misinterpreting both God, the Author of human nature, and our relationship with Him. Or it might lead to disbelief in God altogether. The IL takes none of this into account in its indiscriminate exaltation of indigenous belief and practice.

What is more, the IL tells us that the Amazon, or some other indigenous or communal territory, is “a particular source of God’s revelation,” an “epiphanic” place offering “life and wisdom for the planet” (19). This rather grandiose description blurs the radical distinction between natural and supernatural revelation, and possibly also that between God and His creation, as we have seen elsewhere in the document. Equally murky is the description of the epiphanic territory as “a place of meaning for faith or the experience of God in history.” Taken together with similar texts, we can be confident that we are dealing here with a Modernist understanding of revelation and faith.

In line with Modernism, the IL is suggesting that the “revelation” of God takes place immanently in human beings, as the coming-to-consciousness of a natural, subconscious religious impulse that has been stimulated by the experience of a given people in a given territory. Their “wisdom” and way of life represents the collective interpretation and expression of that experience. As such, it can change over time, as their changing life-experiences provide the occasion for a new interior “revelation.” The way they experience God today in their life can therefore contradict the way they experienced Him yesterday. But the IL, in true Modernist fashion, seems always to regard such an “evolution” as progress in the “truth” of one’s religious experience–that is, as a raising of religious consciousness, or a “development of doctrine,” if you will.

Alternatively, external sources of truth, with which one comes into contact through exposure to the concrete expression of other people’s inner religious experience, can help confirm believers in their religious differences, which, thanks to interreligious dialogue, serve as a stimulus for them to go on believing what they already believe anyway (136). In the IL’s Modernist scheme, objective truth is nonexistent, for the locus of “truth” is one’s own, subjective experience. Accordingly, people can have conflicting, yet equally valid truths.

Heterogeneous religious experiences can also be adapted as necessary to fit into the faith experience one already has. The IL’s enthusiasm for the intercultural sharing of collective wisdoms can therefore be taken as an invitation to fine-tune one’s inner religious sense, or “faith,” by exposure to other people’s “truth.” Thus, faith must be inculturated, so that it becomes “an expression of one’s own religious experience” (125; italics added).

It follows that indigenous peoples need not abandon their pagan signs and symbols if they wish to become Catholic. Instead, the IL proposes their using these to dress up the liturgy, which would become lifeless and obsolete without such inculturating adaptations (124). Similarly, catechists can put the inspired Word of God aside and instruct their charges using “narratives” deemed to be in harmony with it, culled from the “age-old wisdom” of pagan belief (123 c). After all, it was “the Spirit of the Lord” who taught, or revealed to, the indigenous people what they know about faith and life (121). In consequence, they should be allowed to reinterpret Christian truth according to their own, specifically Amazonian religious experience.

Bishops and “evangelizers” can therefore glory in the “creativity” by which they adapt the liturgy, along with the faith it is meant to communicate, to suit the tastes and beliefs that “converts” already have to begin with. Indeed, we have seen that the IL regards cultural diversity as the supreme expression of the Church’s universality, and so it is this–and not sharing in the same faith, moral, sacramental, and liturgical life–that constitutes her principle of unity (110, 124). The IL suggests, further, that the mere fact of the Church’s taking on other cultures redeems them (113), as though they had no need of correction, purification, and elevation in the order of grace, so as to reflect and conduce to Christian perfection.

Locating beliefs about God in interior “revelations” about the meaning of one’s concrete, life experiences immunizes them from being questioned or refuted by anyone else. Only “petrified doctrine”–a pejorative allusion to the absolute truth claims of Catholic Christianity–must be rejected, since “truth,” and the knowledge of it, are always evolving, and so can never be known absolutely. The Abu Dhabi Declaration that Pope Francis signed onto with a Muslim leader, which states that God wills the pluralism and diversity of religions, presupposes this kind of religious relativism, giving the IL’s authors carte blanche to promote it. (In stating also that God wills the pluralism and diversity of “sex,” and that “each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression, and action,” the declaration will likewise give ecclesial voices promoting “sexual diversity,” as the IL does covertly, the “official” justification they need push their destructive agenda further.)

The IL’s position, then, is that the Catholic Church does not, after all, have in her possession a definitive, unchanging deposit of faith that everyone must believe (and live by), on the authority of God Himself, who has revealed it publicly, in human history, for the sake of human salvation. In turn, it follows that there can be no, one religious faith that can serve as the measure and interpreter of all human experience and, more particularly, of all religious experience. Faith then reduces to my experience, or to that of my group–in other words, to how I or we interpret life and the surrounding world. In that case, the Church has no business trying to “impose” her own faith experience on indigenous Amazonian peoples (or anyone else). Rather, she must humble herself and “recognize indigenous spirituality as a source of riches for the Christian experience” (123 b; italics added).

The IL is talking specifically here about native pagan spirituality (see 123 a), as though there were some sort of parity between the non-Christian spiritual experience and that of the Christian. But it is impossible for the former to be a source of enrichment for the latter, since the natural and the tainted cannot enrich the supernatural in the order of grace.

Through sanctifying grace, the Christian participates in the life and love of the Holy Trinity itself, placing that individual in an intimate, personal relationship with each of the three divine Persons. Along with this relationship, established in baptism, God infuses the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity into the soul. These, together with other sacramental and special graces, elevate Christian life and action to the level of God Himself, our supernatural end. Indigenous spirituality is, at best, a reflection of the natural, sometimes hidden aspiration toward this same end, born of the longing for eternal life and blessedness that God has implanted in every human heart. At worst, indigenous spirituality expresses a relationship and a cooperation with demons.

Jesus Christ and His Mission in the IL

The IL has relatively few references to Jesus Christ–mostly token and tendentious–and a near absence of anything concerning what He has actually revealed, promised, and accomplished for us. It is unsurprising, then, that we are left with a thoroughly subversive document clad infrequently, and then only scantily, in Christian garb.

The IL’s Modernist understanding of revelation and faith cuts right to the heart of the Catholic faith, or true religion, allowing the authors of the document to bolster the status of pagan belief and practice, or false religion. At the same time, they relativize all religion. There is only one possible explanation for their taking this position: the IL’s authors do not believe that Jesus Christ is God–not in the true and unqualified sense, at least.

The IL’s Modernist Take on Jesus of Nazareth

The document’s authors make a point of telling us that “Jesus became incarnate in a particular culture” (108). It would perhaps have been a little more reassuring if they had said, more precisely, that the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, became incarnate in a particular culture. But let us grant the truth of their statement as it stands.

The problem is, the IL’s authors understand the statement Modernistically, which is a way of denying that the teaching, the institutions, and the promises we received from Jesus Christ are transcultural, eternally valid, and intended for everyone, hence not subject to change or to interpretations contrary to the Church’s perennial understanding. As we have seen, this denial paves the way for the IL’s completely undermining the Church’s deposit of faith, her moral teaching, her sacraments, her liturgy, and her divine constitution. For it would mean that the “experience” Jesus of Nazareth had of God, however intense it might have been, and however exemplary for Christians it might still be, was nevertheless culturally and historically conditioned, hence partial and somewhat myopic. We have therefore to look to the experiences that other peoples have of God in order to fill in the picture and approach the full truth about God more closely.

We know, for example, that Jesus “experienced” God as “Father” and referred to Him as such. We cannot fault Him for that, as this experience would have been dictated by the categories of thought and expression available to Him in His particular religious-cultural milieu. On the other hand, the “Spirit of the Lord”–and there is no telling how the IL understands this designation–has taught the indigenous peoples of the Amazon to have “faith in the God Father-Mother Creator” (121), since their time, place and culture made them more open to experiencing God thus. Since the Spirit taught them more than He did Jesus, their “truth” helps us arrive at a fuller “truth” about God.

We have no basis for questioning this indigenous “truth,” for the Spirit of God “revealed” it to them interiorly, by illuminating the meaning of their concrete experience of life in communion with “Mother Nature.” Their “faith” experience is therefore beyond the scrutiny of others. Instead, we all need to dialogue with and learn from them. This is especially true of Catholics, so that our stodgy old doctrines can “evolve” further toward the whole truth, or even reverse course, if necessary, should we encounter contradictory, but more enlightened, Amazonian “truths.”

Of course, if Jesus did not know God fully, then He cannot Himself be God; therefore, we can say that He is “the fullness of all revelation” in only a subjective and relative sense, pertaining to Christian belief only. If Jesus is not God, moreover, He would not have been immune to error. This would explain how the IL can depict the “Spirit” as teaching different peoples things contrary to, and irreconcilable with, what Jesus taught. The document suggests that the Spirit teaches diverse populations the meaning of their life in novel ways particular to them, within the context of their own historical, cultural, and ecological setting. By undermining thus the universality of Christ’s truth, the IL effectively denies the existence of objective religious truth altogether, banishing Jesus from the Godhead and dissolving the Holy Trinity at the same time.

So, on the one hand, Christians take Jesus of Nazareth’s experience of God as fundamental to their way of expressing their own religious experience. This would explain the single instance in which the IL employs the trinitarian formula (115), while not implying thereby that the document regards the formula’s meaning as definitively true.

On the other hand, Christians must recognize “other avenues/pathways that seek to decipher the inexhaustible mystery of God” (39), rather than presuming to think that everyone else’s salvation hinges on God as Christian’s understand Him in their own creed. Accordingly, the IL asserts that “love lived in any religion pleases God.” Ironically, an absolute assertion such as this would seem at odds with the relativistic, Modernist position that the document advances–except when we consider its meaning in Modernist terms: any and every personal experience of God and of love is valid, precisely as an experience.

In view of this, we must surely not underestimate the direction of the IL’s insistence that the Church be open and welcoming to biological, social, religious, and cultural diversities; for hidden therein is the rationale for pressuring the Church to accept expressions of “love” contrary to her perennial moral teaching. This, in turn, would require her to accept a new “understanding” of God Himself, so as to justify her doing so. The IL is well invested in bringing this about, through its unabashed promotion of pagan belief and practice, beneath the fig leaf of “inculturated Christianity.” While those promoting such a travesty would dismiss these and other radical changes to the Catholic faith merely as “doctrinal developments,” its real source resides, not so much in religious relativism, as in atheism.

As the IL must alter the truth about God to achieve its nefarious ends, so must it alter the truth about Christ, as we have seen. It seems that the only thing Jesus got right, from the IL’s point of view, was His dialogical and inclusive approach to other people, as exemplified in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well (36; Jn 4:1-42). Never mind that this is the only extended example of this type in the Gospels. The IL has recognized its paradigmatic significance and seized on it.

The problem here is that the document has failed to seize on other significant things, such as the fact that Jesus spent most of His time, not listening, but teaching. Indeed, His dialogue with the Samaritan woman was simply the method by which He taught her that He is the Messiah, the Savior of the world.

Jesus has also been known to issue some pretty unconditional commandments, beginning with “repent, and believe in the Gospel” (Mk 1:15). Here, He is as much as telling us, “Do this or die in your sins,” not, “Let’s open this option up for discussion.”

Jesus could be not only undialogical, but also rather exclusive. Just ask the Pharisees (Mt 23:13-36). He taught us that the attitude we take toward Him will determine whether He will be inclusive or exclusive, dialogical or undialogical: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 7:21). And the Father’s will is that we are to believe in the One whom He has sent, His eternally begotten Son (Jn 6:29). In a word, Jesus Christ is Himself the criterion of our definitive inclusion in, or exclusion from, the kingdom of heaven, precisely because Jesus is God, eternally consubstantial with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

Two things follow from this, relative to our present discussion. First, Jesus’s revelation of His Heavenly Father as Father is complete and definitive, contrary to what the IL’s authors would have us believe. Second, Jesus’s commandments, teachings, and, above all, the example of His self-sacrificial life and death, reveal the concrete and definitive content of love. Any departure from what He has thus revealed is therefore contrary to love, the radical rejection of which is tantamount to rejecting Christ Himself, thus resulting in one’s exclusion from the kingdom of God.

The IL on the Kingdom of God

The kingdom that Jesus announced, and to which He is “the Way,” is a divine reality. It refers to our sharing in the very Life and Love of God through union with the Person of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church is the sign and instrument of God’s kingdom, present seminally in her. We possess the kingdom when we possess Christ through the life of grace in the Spirit, by which we become children of the Father. As members of Christ’s Body, the intimacy of our union with Him is such that Jesus describes its perfect fulfillment as a wedding feast (Mt 22:2), and John as the marriage of the Lamb (Rev 19:7).

This marriage begins in baptism and is continuous with, and “consummated” in, the beatific vision of God in eternal glory. It bestows on us the abundant life that Jesus offers everyone (Jn 10:10), and that is available only in and through Him, acting in and with His Church. In the present life, we manifest our citizenry in God’s kingdom–the fact that God reigns in our hearts through His tri-personal presence therein–by our covenantal fidelity to Him. This entails our reflecting His righteousness here and now, through the righteousness of our relations with one another, in the love and joy of the Holy Spirit.

In contrast, consider how the IL’s authors understand the kingdom of God. God’s kingdom is identified with a series of causes, encompassing political, economic, social, cultural, and ecological relations (37). It demands a response that includes “denouncing sinful situations, structures of death, violence and internal and external injustices, and fostering intercultural, interreligious and ecumenical dialogue” (11). Dialogue is the key to resolving the “great questions of humanity,” for its purpose is to foster a social and cultural pact in which people agree to live together, and no one is excluded (37). Justice demands that we affirm and promote cultural, social, religious, and ecological otherness (another word for “diversity”). From the IL’s point of view, then, the causes of justice and otherness are identical with the causes of the kingdom of God.

We must therefore follow the example of the indigenous Amazonian people by establishing a cosmic and inclusive harmony connecting us with one another, with nature, and with God. In this way, “we can forge a project full of life” (12). Having life abundantly–that is, living contentedly with otherness–is the result. Accordingly, the IL envisions the kingdom of God as an earthly utopia that we usher in through dialogue.

In order to take up the causes of the kingdom and to help usher it in, the Church must rethink her mission. She must make herself “present in the social, political, economic, cultural and ecological life” of the indigenous Amazonian peoples (112). Catholics should therefore support men and women religious who, offering their lives in service to the most impoverished and excluded peoples, become political activists, so as “to transform reality” (129 d, 2). What is more, the Church should meet with representatives of other religions, so as to collaborate with them on caring for the earth and securing the common good in the face of external aggressions (139 a). This means “rejecting a monoculturalist, clericalist and colonial tradition that imposes itself” (110, 119 b), and embracing cultural diversity fearlessly. We can take all this as a mission model that the Church in the Amazon is offering to the Church universal.

Nowhere, it seems, does the IL envision the Church’s mission as one of bringing souls to the Father, through His divine Son, in the grace of the Holy Spirit. Nowhere does it evince any awareness of the essential nature of the kingdom of God, which begins with that very grace–that is, with the sanctification by which we participate in the divine Life, and which is mediated to us through the Church’s sacraments, as instituted and bequeathed to her by Christ, for the eternal salvation of souls.

While sanctifying grace, together with other gracious gifts of the Spirit, does bear fruit in righteous living and in the human institutions built on it, the IL virtually identifies the “life full of God” that Jesus offers with a vibrant, “integral” life in this world. This so-called life full of God manifests itself not just in human life, but also in that of every biological entity, all viewed together within their ecological context (11). Here, as elsewhere, the IL’s blurring of God’s life with worldly forms of life has undeniably pantheistic overtones.

The document’s failure to identify the abundant life that Jesus won for us, through the paschal mystery, with our participation in the very Life and Love of God, can only reinforce suspicions about its Christology, or about whether it has anything left of a Christology. When we recall that the IL’s anthropology seems unable to distinguish brother tree and sister fungus from Mr. and Mrs. Jones, we are, alas, justified in concluding that the God-Man, as the document presents Him, has also, like man himself, been rendered extinct.

Conclusion

It should be unequivocally clear from the exposition above—by no means exhaustive—that the Pan-Amazon Instrumentum Laboris proposes nothing less than the destruction of the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. The Church’s divinely revealed doctrine and moral precepts, the ecclesial discipline that derives from and testifies to these, the Church’s divinely instituted sacraments, liturgy, and structure—all of these the IL would forsake in favor of an “inculturated” Christianity with an Amazonian face.

More accurately, the IL seems hell-bent on inducing indigenous Amazonian Catholics to return to indigenous pagan idolatry—to the practice of worshiping demons and doing evil under their deadly influence—but now wearing a flimsy, Christian guise. This guise will prove useful in seducing Amazonian Catholics to apostatize.

The IL positively bristles at the idea that the culture of the original Western colonialists, informed though it was by Catholic Christianity, could have been in any way superior or beneficial to indigenous, Amazonian culture. The Modernist authors of the IL seem wholly unmoved by the fact that the Christian sensibilities of some colonial civil authorities impelled them to curb indigenous sexual perversion and savagery, in that way complementing the work of the Catholic missions. The cultural and moral relativism of the document’s authors precludes their making any meaningful judgments against indigenous life and practice. Instead, they encourage the view that indigenous ways, though perhaps unsettling to others, are merely reflections of a vigorous bio-social and cultural diversity. Absolute judgments about cultural and moral failings are therefore valid only against the original Western colonialists, and now the neo-colonialists, with whom the IL deems dialogue to be quite impossible.

The IL has higher hopes for the Catholic Church, however. Through intercultural dialogue with indigenous Amazonian peoples, she can “unlearn” her divinely given identity—inseparable though it is from her divine mission of upholding human dignity and saving souls—so as to discover herself anew by adopting the pagan ways of life and worship historically intertwined with indigenous Amazonian culture. Never mind that this inculturated form of “Christianity” will guarantee, among its practitioners, a widespread return to the bloody and perverse, demonically instigated practices that were once interwoven so seamlessly into the fabric of indigenous Amazonian life.

Notice how, in the IL’s vision of “dialogue” with indigenous culture, the Church is the only one that has to listen: “Respectful listening . . . does not impose formulations of faith expressed with other [i.e., Western] cultural referents that do not respond to [the people’s] lived reality” (120). Now notice the inherent contradiction: cross-cultural understanding and assimilation can happen in one direction (that of the Church) but not the other (that of the native Amazonians). Though personal human nature is the source of culture and transcends it, the IL implies that truth, understood as a cultural expression of personal experience, is unintelligible and irrelevant when clothed in cultural categories foreign to a given people; therefore, the Gospel must always be translated to accord with one’s own culturally conditioned experience.

This is to deny the possibility of cultural transcendence, of expanding one’s own categories of thought and expression by assimilating those of others, so that one’s own culture can improve. While the IL insists that the Gospel must be endlessly force fit into the cultural comfort zone of every people, thus ensuring its free fall into irrelevance, the document boasts, at the same time, that the new Amazonian Church it proposes will have something to teach the whole world. This means that Amazonian expressions of faith are universally comprehensible and applicable, while Western or other expressions of faith are not.

Its inherent contradictions aside, the IL’s vision of “dialogue” is utopian in an almost Teilhardian way. Different cultures and religions are supposed to share their multiplicity of “truths” about life, so as to synthesize them into a larger, unifying truth. In accordance with the law of evolution, such voluntary mutual encounter will enable humanity to progress toward psychic unity, or unity of consciousness.

What is more, the indigenous Amazonian way of life has specially equipped the natives to teach everyone else that dialogue takes place not only with people of other cultures, but also with nature, that is, with matter imbued with “spirit.” Engaging in such dialogue will get everyone in closer touch with nature, so that we all become more ecologically conscious. Dialogue with the aboriginal Amazonians and, following their example, with nature will thus lead to a global, ecologically enlightened meeting of minds. This global vision can then supplant an individualistic and nationalistic mentality and way of life. With everyone thus on the same page, all will agree, for example, that “responsible” contraception or sterilization is necessary to reduce populations, and so, too, the carbon footprint left by human activity, which is the “indisputably proven” cause of “climate change” and other environmental disasters.

Obstinate individuals, groups, and nations that refuse to comply voluntarily with such efforts to ensure the good of our common home will have to be forced to do so—in the case of nations, by a supranational body of enforcers. We would be sadly mistaken to think that the IL’s inherently godless cosmovision would not lead inexorably to such tyranny, and worse besides.

Only the Catholic Church, insofar as she is true to her divine mandate, stands in the way of this radical agenda. That is why the IL argues for a thoroughgoing, and thoroughly corrupting, “inculturation” of the faith. The furious determination of its advocates might well portend widespread success in this regard.

Of course, the Church’s Bridegroom will not allow His Bride to perish completely. But in order to expose the ultimately demonic instigation behind the effort to take her down, let us pose the following question: What if this effort were to succeed?

The answer is simple, stark, and unequivocal: no one would be saved. Absent the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, every human being in the world would be damned. This is the ultimate meaning behind the ancient dictum, “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus”: Outside the Church there is no salvation (Catechism, 846). Accordingly, the total annihilation of the Catholic Church would be Satan’s dearest goal, were it possible. Short of his achieving that end, the next best thing he can do is to incite his human collaborators to erect counterfeit churches, such as the one proposed by the IL.

It is true that Jesus Christ alone is the universal Savior of the World, the one and only Mediator between God and man (1 Tm 2:5). It is also true that He offers His grace in and through His Spirit even beyond the visible boundaries of the Church. At the same time, however, He does not ever do so apart from the Church, the Bride with whom He, the divine Bridegroom, is indissolubly united (Mt 28:20; Eph 5:31-32; Dominus Iesus, 16-17, 20-22).

Since Christ has willed to act always in and through His Church, it follows that whoever is saved by His grace must either be fully a member of the Church, in imperfect communion with her (minimally, through valid Christian baptism), or in some way related to and tending toward her by favorably responding to graces received mysteriously through her, in a way known only to God.

In a word, God has established the Church as the universal sacrament and instrument of salvation (Lumen Gentium, 9, 17, 48). She will therefore endure beyond any internal or external crisis that men, in willful collaboration with the devil, can contrive. While we must not underestimate the damage and confusion that they will cause, clarity will finally come out of it, as the Church’s enemies become more bold and reckless, blind and godless, in their destructive rage. In the end, they will expose their own deceits for all to see, and be hoist with their own petard.

Perhaps we can take the Amazonian darkness that now seems to be enveloping the whole Church as a sign that her sins, and those of the whole world, have finally come home to roost. While the Lord might yet will to intervene and abruptly foil the carefully devised plan presented in the IL, He might just as well will to leave us seemingly to ourselves for a time, allowing the plan to unfold to the extent that He permits.

Whatever may come, faithful Catholics must trust unreservedly in Jesus Christ, whose ways and invincible power are beyond human comprehension. He will act when and how He pleases, always with an eye (or seven eyes) toward bringing about the greatest possible good, especially for His Bride, the Holy Catholic Church. In her, the faithful must always remain, while also defending her by their prayers, fasting, holiness of life, and intrepid witness to divinely revealed truth.

As for the poor souls behind the Pan-Amazonian pandemonium that seems to be breaking loose in the Church, their efforts will prove, in the end, to have been sheer vanity. They are merely chasing after the wind.

July 24, 2019July 30, 2019

On Priestly Celibacy

An Old Testament Justification for Priestly Celibacy

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March 26, 2019July 30, 2019

Ecclesial Gay Agenda

Did Maltese Archbishop Propose a Preferential Option for Gays?

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March 21, 2019October 26, 2019

Hitchcock’s Rope and its Relevance to the Church’s Sexual Abuse Crisis

by Jeffrey Tranzillo

In 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two intellectually precocious, teenage university students in a homosexual relationship, murdered one of Loeb’s relatives, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. According to their interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, the pair’s intellectual superiority placed them above the moral norms governing ordinary men; therefore, they decided to plan and execute the perfect murder (1) as an intellectual experiment; (2) to get the widespread attention they thought their previous crimes deserved; (3) for the thrill of it.

In 1929, British author Patrick Hamilton published a play entitled Rope, whose two protagonists were based rather closely on Leopold and Loeb–homosexuality and all. Nearly twenty years later, Alfred Hitchcock produced and directed a film adaptation of Hamilton’s play, retaining the same title, as well as hints of the homosexual element (which was all a filmmaker could hope to get past the censors back then).

In Hitchcock’s version of the story, the two main characters remain patterned on Leopold and Loeb, whose personalities were marred by psychological and temperamental features common to the homosexual disorder, and also by the destructive effects of the precipitous moral decline that comes with acting on that disorder. None of this was lost on Hitchcock, who had a predilection for exploring, in his films, the sometimes tortured psychological depths of his dramatis personae.

We can therefore use the film as a point of departure for highlighting some of the typical personality traits and behaviors of homosexually active persons; however, we will be interpreting these based on the work of Christian psychologists who have specialized in the homosexual condition,[1] and who have achieved notable success in diminishing or eliminating the same-sex attraction in motivated patients who have sought their help. Following this, we will show the relevance of our analysis to the problem of clerical sexual abuse in the Church, incorporating additional elements from a sound, Christian anthropology. First, a brief overview of Rope.

Synopsis of ROPE

Brandon Shaw and Philip Morgan are wealthy, young Harvard graduates sharing an apartment in Manhattan. Brandon is steely, manipulative, and domineering, whereas Philip is highly emotional, completely dependent on Brandon, and submissive to his directives. Their former mentor, Rupert Cadell, had indoctrinated them with his Hitlerian take on Nietzsche’s Superman. Intellectually and culturally superior individuals, he told them, are not bound by the moral concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, that govern the masses. It is therefore the privilege of these individuals to murder inferior human beings. For most men, murder would be a crime; however, the lofty few are capable of turning that ordinarily base act into an art.

Whereas Rupert is all talk, his two protégés aim to prove their greatness by carrying out an actual murder, the perfect murder. They choose, as “the perfect victim,” a former classmate, David Kentley: “The Davids of this world merely occupy space,” Brandon declares.[2] The film opens at (and never leaves) the apartment, where Philip is strangling David with a rope, while Brandon supports the victim. They then throw the corpse into a large, wooden chest.

In order to enhance the “aesthetic” quality of the murder, and also to heighten the danger of getting caught (viewed as a merely theoretical possibility, given the superior intellect that planned it), Brandon had earlier invited the victim’s parents and two former classmates–including David’s prospective spouse–to attend a dinner party at the apartment, set to begin shortly after the murder. He had also invited Rupert Cadell. The host had given them all the impression that David would be attending too.

To turn this “work of art” into “a masterpiece,” Brandon got the last-minute idea of turning the dinner party into a buffet, with the food laid out on the chest in which David’s body is laid out. The fact that the chest isn’t even locked has Philip worried, but not Brandon: it adds to the danger of getting caught.

The central topic of the dinner party is, “Where is David?” Brandon has a grand time playing dumb, speculating about David’s absence, deceitfully manipulating the guests, and even dropping subtle hints that something had, indeed, happened to David. Philip, on the other hand, is an emotional wreck, intent on getting drunk. After all the guests had left the party, Rupert, suspicious of his former pupils, returned to try and unravel the mystery of David’s absence. When he finally succeeded, he summoned the police.

Rope and the Psychopathology of the Homosexual Disorder

Let us now examine some of the basic characteristics of the homosexual profile presented accurately, if subtly, in Rope.

Faux Complementarity

Rope is replete with allusions to the mock complementarity of homosexual “couples.” Brandon (patterned on Loeb) clearly plays the part of the stereotypical man in his relationship with Philip (patterned on Leonard), dominating him to the point of making every decision for him about his own life, down to the smallest detail. Philip, on the other hand, plays the part of the stereotypical woman: weak, emotional, easily upset, submissive, and utterly reliant on Brandon for everything.

Visibly shaken by their bloody deed, Philip wishes the victim had been someone other than David. “Whom would you have preferred?” Brandon asks. “You, perhaps,” Philip replies. “You frighten me. You always have.” This moment of truth was clearly out of character for Philip, and Brandon icily brings him back into line–an early indication of trouble in paradise. Though Brandon is a cold, calculating, and threatening figure, Philip suggests that this might be part of his “charm.” Philip sees in him the “strong,” or “manly,” qualities that he perceives as lacking in himself, this forming the basis of his erotic attraction to Brandon.

For his part, Brandon, in addition to his need to be domineering, feared, and idolized, acknowledges that he has “always wished for more artistic talent.” So, the basis for his erotic attraction to Philip is the latter’s (vastly overrated) musical ability, his servility, and his awe of Brandon. “You just astound me, as always,” Philip tells him.

This illustrates well that the homosexual “relationship” is not complementary at all, but mutually parasitic. Each man feeds off the other in order to try and satisfy his infantile emotional and psychological needs. Narcissistic to its core, this relationship replaces the truth of male-female complementarity–which is ontologically grounded, hence objectively real–with an eroticized mutual attraction based on mutual envy, which expresses itself in the superstition that “like cures like.” By sexually “possessing” a man who has the qualities that the other man lacks but wants for himself, he supposes that he will, by association, come to possess these qualities as well, without any further effort on his part. Sodomites thus pervert the meaning of a married man and woman’s forming one body (Gn 2:24; Mt 19:4-6), whereby his masculinity and her femininity are perfected–precisely because truly complementary–in the reciprocal gift of their persons to each other, according to God’s creative and redemptive plan.

Nietzschean Narcissism

It is easy to see how Nietzsche’s philosophy would feed the narcissistic homosexual ego, and encourage its irresponsible outward expression. Brandon never tires of trying to convince himself, and everyone else, that he personifies Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman–a creative genius who transcends the weakness of ordinary men by dispensing with their traditional values and creating his own norms of existence. The new norms reflect and foster his superiority. The Superman rejects any virtue or vice that he thinks signifies weakness. He is therefore utterly free to express his intellectual prowess, will, physical strength, instincts, and passions in any way that signifies, to him, his strength and power. He thus confers his own meaning on the world.

For example, when Philip asks Brandon how he felt “during it”–ostensibly meaning the murder, but hinting at their sodomy as well–he replies that he doesn’t remember feeling much of anything, until the body went limp. Then he “felt tremendously exhilarated.” Why? Because in violently asserting his dominance over another person (whether David or Philip) until the latter succumbed, he experienced the “thrill” of having transgressed a boundary that “inferior” men are forbidden to cross. Having “transcended” the ordinary, Brandon proved himself superior to the masses: he “created” a situation in which he exercised absolute freedom and control. The only crime, he says, is making a mistake, which is a sign of weakness, ordinariness. The “mistake,” in this case, would be that something does not go as planned, so that he and Philip fail, or get caught.

Though Philip doesn’t really fit the Superman mold, Brandon insists that he won’t let either of them be weak. Philip’s “weakness” is that, unlike Brandon, he still evinces a glimmer of conscience over what they’ve done. Nietzsche would classify such weakness as belonging to “slave morality,” as opposed to “master morality.” This distinction aptly describes the master-slave nature of Brandon and Philip’s debased relationship, which reflects the radically narcissistic and utilitarian structure of homosexually active relationships in general.

Brandon became intoxicated with an overwhelming sense of power after the murder. He felt that “the power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create.” He and Philip killed for the sake of killing, for the danger it entailed, and for the experiment of doing it, and yet they were still “truly and wonderfully alive.” In Nietzschean terms, they exercised their “will to power,” having conferred on life the meaning they wanted it to have, so as to affirm it by their own strength. Only the inferior man needs to posit a God who supplies life’s meaning. Implicitly, the superior man is God, having power over life and death.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Brandon decided to give his dinner party a pseudo-religious significance. Placing candelabras on the chest containing David’s body, he and Philip would turn it into “a ceremonial altar” on which to heap “the foods for our sacrificial feast.” Thus, in order to prove his personal and “moral” superiority–that is, for his own sake–Brandon “sacrificed” the life of someone else.

In contrast to Brandon’s intoxication with the “power” of evil, Philip tries to intoxicate himself with alcohol, so as to ease the pain of his guilt. Even more, he wants to ease his fear of getting caught. That he is concerned more about himself than about the man he murdered exposes his own brand of narcissism. For his part, Brandon is absolutely indifferent to the fact that he murdered another human being, for that constituted, for him, his supreme act of self-affirmation.

Overcompensation

The active homosexual’s sense of superiority derives from the psychological mechanism of overcompensation, by which he tries to suppress his characteristic, overwhelming sense of inferiority. It is this that fuels his inordinate need for affirmation. That’s why Brandon just had to invite Rupert to the dinner party. Cadell was the one person brilliant enough to unravel the murder. Once he did, Brandon supposed his former mentor would shower him with the praises he craved. Rupert would surely appreciate the “artistic” angle of the murder.

Still, the murderers are superior even to him, for Brandon surmised that Rupert would not have had the “courage” to participate in the murder itself. So, on the one hand, Brandon tries to suppress his feelings of inferiority by contriving reasons for affirming his own superiority: he is courageous, Rupert is not. Yet, he still wants desperately to secure Rupert’s affirmation–and perhaps also his overawed admiration, in the hope of turning Rupert into another Philip. After all, Brandon admitted to him, “you always interest me.”

Here, the film hints at homosexual promiscuity, which represents, in part, an attempt to compensate for the absence of real complementarity in the homosexual relationship. The fact that Brandon is prepared to murder Rupert, should the latter solve the crime and then threaten to expose him, shows just how superficial and self-serving his “interest” in his old schoolmaster really is.

Brandon’s relentless domination of Philip is yet another twisted, compensatory expression of superiority and self-affirmation. Once all the guests had left and Philip was well under the influence, he inveighed against Brandon for his narcissistic boast that the evening “couldn’t have gone more beautifully.” For Philip had “a rotten evening.” Brandon warned him stonily that he would have “a worse morning” if he kept drinking. He was clearly alluding to the violent and total nature of his mastery over Philip in their sodomitic relationship. Philip acknowledges this obliquely by retorting, “At least if I have a hangover it will be all mine.” In this way, Hitchcock has effectively brought to light the inherently violent and dehumanizing nature of sodomitic relationships in general.

Indeed, when Philip was reduced to hysterics shortly thereafter, because Rupert was on the phone asking to return to the apartment, Brandon slapped him sharply in the face, declaring menacingly, “I’m not going to get caught because of you or anyone else. No one is going to get in my way now.” At that point, Brandon took out his gun and put it in his pocket. The implication, here, that he would, if necessary, murder even Philip to save his own neck indicates, once again, that the sodomitic relationship has no real foundation to begin with. It does not contribute in any way to the perfection of the persons involved, for it is inherently narcissistic, utilitarian, violent, alienating, and destructive. Once its uselessness as a means of compensating for psychological and emotional deficits is exposed, there is nothing left but mutual contempt and resentment.

Shipwreck in the Wake of Truth

When drunken Philip realized that Rupert Cadell, on his second visit to the apartment, figured out what he and Brandon had done to David, he grabbed Brandon’s gun and pointed it at both Rupert and Brandon, saying he’d just assume kill the one as the other–Brandon sooner, in fact. “You made me do it and I hate you–I hate both of you!”

Philip blamed the others for his own actions, rather than take responsibility for them himself. Implicitly and falsely, he was denying thereby that he had acted as a free agent. Seeing himself instead as the tragic victim, he wanted to destroy in Brandon and Rupert what he hated in himself. Indeed, the inferiority complex of the active homosexual tends to express itself as an unbearable self-loathing, projected onto others.

Brandon’s self-loathing expressed itself in other ways. His need to dominate Philip violently was an outward expression of his inner turmoil. So, too, was his constant effort to increase his risk of getting caught for his misdeeds. On the one hand, a part of him sought the attention that being exposed would bring him, as this would assuage his infantile self-centeredness. At the same time, however, he was inwardly compelled to keep increasing the dosage of danger, as his tolerance for eroticized excitement built up in proportion to the death of his soul.

Because of its moribund condition, Brandon’s soul was increasingly difficult to satisfy. Deep down, danger had become, for him, the prescription for deriving excitement from his own spiritual demise, and for temporarily offsetting its effects; therefore, it was at once an expression of, and an attempt to disguise, his inner sense of self-contempt. More specifically, Brandon’s obsession with danger signified a secret death wish. One way to realize that wish was to get caught, so that others could punish him for what he loathed in himself, and thus put an end to it.

After Rupert managed to wrestle the gun away from Philip, he proceeded to open the wooden chest. Sickened and ashamed at seeing David’s corpse therein, he immediately renounced completely his Nietzschean take on life.

Regardless, Brandon–having killed his own conscience, and hence impervious to a salutary sense of shame–still needed to justify himself. So, he reminded Rupert of their Nietzschean outlook, explaining that he and Philip have merely “lived what you and I have talked.” He then declared emphatically, “I knew you’d understand, because you have to, don’t you see? You have to!” True to the typical psychological profile of the unrepentant, active homosexual, Brandon sought to rationalize his evildoing, while pitying himself as the tragic figure that no one understands because he is somehow “different,” or even “special.”

Rupert’s unconditional condemnation, rather than affirmation, of Brandon and his murderous deed completely negated the “values” by which Brandon had been interpreting himself and the world. In a single instant, he lost his whole take on reality, including his false sense of identity as a “creative genius.” Whereas real meaning is grounded in the truth of being, Brandon tried futilely to define himself and the world in terms of congenial theories that temporarily satisfied the needs of his fragile ego. In the end, reality confronted the delusory lie and obliterated it.

Clerical Sexual Abuse in the Light of Rope, Christian Psychology, and Christian Anthropology

Highlighting, as it does, a philosophical outlook whose aberrant trajectory has already been taken, in recent history, to the most appalling extremes,[3] Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope serves as a sober warning: the moral subjectivism and the moral relativism presently overtaking the Church are eerily Nietzschean, hence inexorably disastrous. Interestingly enough, Nietzsche described man as a rope stretched across the abyss between animal and Superman. Hitchcock’s Rope shows that when man strives to reach the “Superman” side of that abyss by dispensing with traditional (particularly, Christian) values and creating new ones that give life the meaning he decides, he ends up acting more brutally than the mindless beast on the other side. For he has now, at his disposal, a complete, subjectivistic program for justifying his own moral decadence.

Nietzsche and the Dogma of “Consent”

Heedless of this, Pope Francis and many of his bishops are effectively encouraging wayward Catholics to confer, on their egregiously sinful moral actions (including sodomy), the meaning that the sinners themselves want them to have, based on what they “discern” their own intentions and circumstances to be. This conferring of personal meaning allegedly establishes the “truth” of an action’s moral quality, thus reflecting “an adult spirituality.”[4]

Yet, it is impossible for personal intentions and circumstances to change the inherently dehumanizing and depersonalizing meaning that gravely immoral actions have in themselves, or to stave off their destructive effects. For God is the Author of our personal, human nature, and of the objective, universally binding and immutable moral laws–both naturally known and supernaturally revealed–by which our nature flourishes, so as to communicate its true meaning and goodness. By acting freely, under grace, in obedience to the moral law, we reflect the wisdom, truth, and goodness of God Himself. Only then do we express ourselves in a truly human and personal way, thus perfecting ourselves, honoring our neighbor, and giving due glory to God.

It follows that every time we perform an evil action, we do direct and incalculable harm to ourselves and to those to whom we relate in an evil way, regardless of our personal intentions and circumstances. For we then participate no longer in the wisdom, truth, and goodness of God’s eternal law. Claims to the contrary are merely hubristic, Nietzschean attempts to deny or eliminate any meaningful restrictions on our freedom, so as to confer on the individual an absolute “right” to create the values by which he or she will interpret reality, and so act, in the most egotistically congenial way: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).

The widespread, uncritical acceptance of this false, relativistic, and ultimately atheistic concept of human freedom explains, in part, why so many priests and bishops are inclined, nowadays, to tolerate and overlook, if not also involve themselves in, the allegedly “consensual” participation of clergy members in sexual sin. The Church will never effectively address the plague of clerical sexual incontinence, or the problems to which it inevitably gives rise–among them, clerical sexual abuse–as long as the “god” of free consent reigns.

Neither Pope Francis nor an alarming number of bishops and priests seem to take seriously purportedly consensual sex acts that, while violating the Sixth Commandment, are legal according to the civil law.[5] Indeed, the pope has stated that he regards consensual “sins below the belt” as “the lightest sins.”[6] He therefore suggests, falsely, that no one is ever seriously hurt by morally illicit but consensual sex, or ever eternally damned because of it. Additionally, his individualistic outlook ignores the social dimension of personal sin, particularly regarding the destructive effects of consensual sexual sin on the family and on society at large.

Since the present pontificate seems to rely on the standard set by recent secular trends in its ecclesial “discernment” about moral good and evil in the sexual (though not only the sexual) sphere, it is reasonable to ask the following question: If, under the pretext that young children are psychologically capable of consenting to having sex with adults (if their consent is required at all), organizations such as NAMBLA or Be4Uact were to succeed in their goal of lowering or eliminating civil age-of-consent laws (which presently proscribe sexual acts between adults and children), would the pope, bishops, and priests who are so tolerant of consensual sex still regard clerical sexual acts involving minors as heinous deeds meriting just, ecclesiastical punishment and thorough extirpation?

It is far from certain that all such “consensus clergy” would answer this question in the affirmative. It is therefore also doubtful that addressing the issue of sex between adults and minors would remain the priority that the Church has officially claimed it is, were civil law to approve the practice. But even if we imagine that all clergy members would still be genuinely opposed to the practice themselves, the “consensus clergy” among them would be hard-pressed to defend their position logically. For their uncritical embrace of the principle of free consent would demand that they proceed in exactly the opposite direction, as they have been doing in the case of sodomy involving adults only. They are willing to overlook this sin–if they regard it as sin at all–simply because it is allegedly “consensual.” The path on which they have thus set themselves leads, inexorably, to Nietzschean self-deification, and is already contaminated with it.

Episcopal Propaganda and Pope Fiction

The illogical way of thinking that, in practice, makes free consent–as an expression of human freedom–the definitive basis on which to judge the morality of an act, gives rise to, if it does not already reflect, an even deeper self-contradiction on the level of being. For in trivializing or denying the objective truth about moral good and evil by acquiescing to, or by giving priority to, an individualistic concept of freedom–particularly when it comes to “consensual” sex–Catholic priests and bishops are well on their way to forsaking, or have already forsaken, the real meaning and purpose of their own priesthood and their own humanity. These latter will then wither for want of the person’s faithful adherence to truth, and to Truth itself.

Once the intellectual conflict with truth, and hence with the Truth, has taken root in the priest or bishop’s way of being, he ends up in mortal conflict with himself. By thinking and acting according to a radically individualistic concept of freedom, he becomes a personified lie. In order then to disguise, for self-serving reasons, his lived disregard for the objectively true moral good, he will typically resort to equivocation and outright mendacity in expressing himself–just as Brandon and Philip did throughout Rope–presenting himself in a way that hides (from the “unenlightened” and the “pharisaical” moral absolutists) the kind of person he has perversely willed become. The homosexual assault cover-ups plaguing the Church are, arguably, in some measure a result of this cult of the false self, and of the determined effort to conceal and foster it.

The morally relativistic and unabashedly mendacious “master morality” mentality, possibly reflecting its correlative way of being, permeated the words and actions of the key players of Pope Francis’s summit on clerical sexual abuse last February. The summit fulfilled thoroughly the widespread expectation that it would neither acknowledge nor address the empirical and statistical fact that active homosexuality is the main cause of the crisis.[7] Proscribing and avoiding mention of the topic, and equivocating or lying about it when it was nonetheless broached, were the only ways in which the pope and the summit’s organizers could suppress the indisputable truth of the matter, and so save what can only be realistically interpreted as their pro-gay agenda.

Cardinal Blaise Cupich insisted that “homosexuality itself is not a cause [of clerics sexually abusing male minors].”[8] Just a few months earlier at the annual USCCB conference in Baltimore, Cupich had played the “consensual” card in order to derail discussion of homosexual activity among clerics involving adults only, and to separate this issue from that of clerical sexual abuse involving minors. “It could be consensual sex,” he opined regarding the former.[9] It is hardly coincidental that this was the very strategy adopted by the organizers of the February summit, especially given that Cupich “just happened” to be named to the organizing committee a mere nine days after his performance in Baltimore. Fellow organizer and narrative manipulator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, did his part to keep up the charade about homosexuality as a nonissue by falsifying Catholic teaching about human sexuality, in giving his reply to a “forbidden” question posed by an Italian journalist during a summit press briefing.10]

Further Parallels between Hitchcock’s Rope and the Clerical Abuse Crisis

Consistent with the findings of credible Christian psychologists who have specialized, and succeeded, in treating the homosexual condition, Rope indicates that the active homosexual harbors acute feelings of inferiority that he tries to mask by asserting his “superiority”–his “power”–over others. This necessarily entails viewing others as inferior. Depersonalizing other human beings in this way makes it easier (along with drugs and alcohol, in some cases) for actively homosexual clergy to justify their vile sexual acts against them. It is a mark of their developmental immaturity and egotistical pride that they need to prove their “superiority” chiefly by humiliating others in the basest of ways. Their looking down on others from on high explains why they, along with their equally arrogant episcopal protectors, tend to remain coldly indifferent to their victims, whom they sometimes also blame or discredit in order to exculpate themselves.

The problem of sexual abuse by homosexual clerics will not go away on its own. When these clerics transgress the clear and absolute moral boundary proscribing this behavior, and thus act in a radically perverted way against other human beings, they destroy the life of supernatural grace and charity in their own soul. It follows that they have no real regard for the temporal and eternal good of the others involved, irrespective of whether this involvement was consensual. The devil can easily fill the empty souls of these clerics with a prideful arrogance about their evildoing, seemingly accomplished with impunity. The risk of their getting caught may provide them with an additional thrill, augmenting the erotic intensity of the evil deed itself.

In consequence, some sexually abusive homosexual clerics might regard their success in lying and maneuvering their way past all the dangers and obstacles–or in receiving episcopal protection to avoid them–as a sign of their “superiority.” They are “gods,” who have glorified themselves by sacrificing, to themselves, the true physical, psychological, emotional, moral, and spiritual good of other persons, and sometimes also the innocence and misplaced trust of their victims. Their psychological and sensual need to do this is insatiable, and the darkening of their mind and the deformation of their will through the habit of perverted sexual behavior guarantees they will seek opportunities to satisfy that need (Rom. 1:20-26). Sexual abuse by homosexual clerics is therefore a self-perpetuating, death-dealing, ecclesial plague. It is governed by Luciferian hubris and its two principal expressions: mendacity and murder (Jn 8:44).

Actively homosexual clerics show contempt not only for their “inferiors,” but also for God as He has actually revealed Himself. To bury the guilt of their troubled conscience, they must fabricate an idol–a nonjudgmental, made-and-loves-me-this-way god, whose “mercy” is sickeningly saccharine and superfluous. But even the affirmation of their own idol–a projection of their egotistical needs–cannot fully relieve their inner sense of guilt and inferiority; therefore, the clerical homosexual network serves, among other things, as an insular society of mutual “affirmation.” In this way, it makes the grandiose, though fragile and delusional attitude of “gay pride” much easier for homosexual clerics to assume and maintain, at least for a time. But if one of them begins to see in any of the others what he has always hated secretly in himself, or if he perceives, in anyone at all, anything other than total acceptance of “who he is,” he will quickly turn his self-hatred on that person.

As the foregoing suggests, the contempt that actively homosexual clerics show for God and neighbor is ultimately an expression of self-contempt, projected and visited on others. The fundamental human need–indeed, vocation–to love and to be loved in truth, and thereby truly to love oneself, has become radically twisted in them, so that they experience and express this need falsely and perversely. The intrinsic lovelessness of active homosexuality is therefore opposed absolutely to the very essence both of Christianity and of God Himself, who is Love (1 Jn 4:8, 16). Inevitably, this opposition turns the individual soul into a battlefield, on which either homosexual hate or, by the grace of God, Christian love will finally prevail.

The inner battle of the Catholic clerical (or lay) sodomite who habitually resists God’s gracious initiatives cannot but express itself outwardly in a way that reflects his resistance. No rapprochement is ever possible, therefore, between inherently narcissistic, active homosexuality and the Christian life. The two cannot reconcile and coexist, for the abyss between hell and heaven is unbridgeable.

This is not to say that all actively homosexual Catholics are incapable of performing any good actions at all. Whatever good they might do, in cooperation with actual grace, might even dispose them toward conversion, with God’s gracious help; however, as they are presently deprived of sanctifying grace, and so, too, of the infused theological virtue of charity (since a good tree cannot possibly produce the rotten fruit of sodomy–the very antithesis of charity), their divinely initiated and assisted good acts cannot reach the supernatural level. Such acts are consequently not meritorious unto eternal life. They will become so only when these individuals have been restored to the state of grace by sincere repentance, sacramental confession, and amendment of life. Short of that, their sodomitic obsessions will continue to dominate their lives and dispose them toward sexually abusing others, even in their consensual sexual relationships. This belongs to the very nature of this most unnatural sin.

Some Final Considerations

In view of the above, if Pope Francis is going to keep insisting that “clericalism” alone explains the sexual abuse problem in the Church,[11] then he needs also to specify, in obedience to the truth, that active homosexuality is far and away the main underlying cause of this particular expression of clericalism. The sodomitic cleric’s “abuse of power” derives from his characteristic lack of power to control his own sexual appetite. Whatever the psychological and emotional reasons for his homosexual inclination, his evil choice to act on it opens in him the floodgates of unbridled lust. In turn, his incessant desire to satisfy both his lust, and his disordered psychological and emotional needs, lends itself to his abusing his priestly authority over others, from whom he seeks or forces sexual contact.[12]These are sure signs that he has fallen from grace.

In order for the Church to remain true to her mission as “a sign and a safeguard of the transcendence of the human person” (Gaudium et Spes, 76), she cannot tolerate the evil of sodomy in her members. Nor can she give the scandalous impression of doing so by allowing active homosexuals to serve in any of her ministries. If she is to exercise a perfect love for the true temporal and eternal good of these souls, she cannot compromise on her teaching about the intrinsically evil and deadly nature of their sin, nor on the urgency of helping them return to the life of grace.

If they choose, instead, to scandalize the faithful by persisting in their sin and even “acting out” publicly, Holy Mother Church must exclude actively homosexual Catholics from the community for the sake of her flock, to which they pose, minimally, a grave moral danger. The “medicine of mercy” that the Church applies to them, or to any other sinner, will prove to be no more than a useless placebo if her love is defective for want of truth, goodness, prudence, and discipline.

Those bishops and priests who are going so far as to “welcome” active homosexuals unconditionally into the life of the Church–even to the point of endorsing their sexual “relationship” or “union,” and their public expressions of it–have cast Christ out of the sanctuary and set up their own abomination of desolation in His place. While their idolatry is comprehensively destructive, it represents a particularly direct and virulent attack against marriage and the family, as instituted by God. While perhaps an incidental detail, it is nonetheless interesting that the “perfect” victim in Rope was the only character serious about getting married.

For the fact is, sodomites despise, undermine, and attack true marriage, both in principle and in practice. To attack this institution is to attack God Himself, its Author. Indeed, the steadfast, self-giving love of a husband and wife for each other–and also for their children, in the unity of the family–is iconic (1) of God’s love for His Church; (2) of His intra-Trinitarian life and love; and (3) of the mystical marriage of Christ, the eternal Bridegroom, and the sanctified members of the Church, His Bride, in the Eucharistic feast. In consequence, the Catholic, above all, who deliberately chooses the act of sodomy, wills, necessarily, to mock these iconic realities in the most flagrant, defiant, and contemptuous way, as this belongs to the very nature of the object willed. It is therefore a sure sign of unbelief, or of intellects and wills crippled by serious moral failure, that some bishops and priests participate in this travesty by admitting “discerning” Catholic sodomites to Holy Communion, and by “blessing” their “unions,” seeking ultimately to impose these sacrilegious practices on the Church universal.

So, Rope has it exactly right: active homosexuality, or idolatry of self, brutally defiles and chokes off the life of the soul, whose inexorable tendency is, consequently, to express itself outwardly in increasingly violent and deadly ways, choking the supernatural, the spiritual, the moral, the psychological, the emotional, or even the physical life out of its victims. The essentially corrupt and corrupting nature of homosexual activity turns the soul into a demonic stronghold, from which it is most difficult for the person to escape. This is partly due to the fact that a demonic influence had long before been exploiting antecedent psychological and emotional pathologies that were already disposing him toward the evil choice for homosexual sin, to which he eventually surrendered.

Since the pope, the organizers, and other participants of February’s Vatican summit studiously refused to get it exactly right themselves–that is, since they refused to diagnose active homosexuality’s inherently violent and deadly nature, so as to address truthfully, and to extirpate as completely as possible, the main source of clerical sexual abuse in the Church–they will be in no position whatsoever to deny their damnable complicity in all the cases of homosexual abuse that they will have consequently allowed to happen in the Church. Nor will they be able to deny their damnable complicity in the tireless efforts of the ecclesial homosexual network to corrupt and destroy the Church. For in view of all the objective evidence, they can no longer reasonably and honestly deny the plain truth about the nature and scope of the crimes perpetrated by well-organized bands of homosexual clerics in the Church.

Seventy years ago, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope conveyed accurately, if subtely, the psychological, the emotional, the intellectual, the volitional, the moral, and even the spiritual impact of sodomy on the person, and, consequently, on how he relates to others. Precisely because of the film’s accuracy–borne out clinically, statistically, anthropologically, and empirically by the manifestly evil fruits born of the sexual abuse crisis in the Church–it testifies clearly and credibly to the fact that there is absolutely no place in the Church for those who persist in their sodomitic ways, nor for clerics (at any level) so cowardly, blind, or malicious as to ignore, trivialize, welcome, or promote such gravely immoral, death-dealing conduct in the Church and her members. Hitchcock’s Rope is therefore an authentic sign for our times.

^[1] It has unfortunately become common, even in Church documents, to describe persons having a same-sex sexual attraction, or who engage in same-sex sexual behavior, as “homosexual.” One reason for using this somewhat misleading term is that it helps the author avoid frequent recourse to more cumbersome, yet more precise, forms of expression. For lack of a better alternative, I have also resorted to this convenience in the present essay. Please note, however, that expressions such as “homosexual person,” or “he is a homosexual,” are not ontological declarations. They refer, in the first place, to a disordered psycho-emotional condition, namely, that of sexual attraction to persons of the same sex. If a person also conducts himself sexually based on his same-sex inclination, then expressions using “homosexual” as an adjective or a noun refer to his morally evil mode of acting as well.

^[2] Note the obvious eugenic implications of Brandon’s statement. Clearly, Hitchcock meant his 1948 film as a resounding denunciation both of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis during the recently concluded, Second World War, and of the Nietzschean ideology they used to help justify their actions. While Brandon staunchly defends his interpretation of Nietzsche, he vigorously reacts against the observation that Hitler shared the very same perspective: “Hitler was a paranoid savage,” he insists, and the Nazi “Supermen” were “brainless murderers. . . . I’d hang them first for being stupid. I’d hang all incompetents and fools anyway. There are far too many in the world.” For Brandon, the decisive difference between his eugenic policy and that of Hitler is his intellectual and cultural superiority, which gives him, and not inferior persons or regimes, the “right” to implement a program of systematic murder, should he so choose. In a word, the very center of his personality is marked by a blinding, Luciferian pride, which governs all his thinking, speech, and activity.

^[3] See note 2 above.

^[4] Pete Baklinski, “Cardinal Cupich: Amoris Laetitia is a Call for an ‘Adult Spirituality’ Where We Discern What is True,” LifeSite News (June 9, 2017), https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-cupich-amoris-laetitia-is-a-call-for-an-adult-spirituality-where-w. According to Amoris Laetitia, the faithful “very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations” (AL, 37). Indeed, the document suggests that God might even make exceptions to His own commandments (thus denying their absolute, or exceptionless, character), rubber-stamping, in the individual conscience, one’s personal decision to commit fornication, adultery, sodomy, polygamy, and so on, even though these are “situations which do not objectively embody our understanding of marriage” (AL, 303).

^[5] E.g., see Pope Francis’s “who am I to judge” comments from the in-flight press conference held during his return trip from World Youth Day XXVIII in Rio de Janeiro, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/july/documents/papa-francesco_20130728_gmg-conferenza-stampa.html

^[6] Sandro Magister, “Memo for the Summit on Abuse. For Francis, the Sins ‘Below the Belt’ are ‘the Lightest’” (January 21, 2019), http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2019/01/21/memo-for-the-summit-on-abuse-for-francis-the-sins-%E2%80%9Cbelow-the-belt%E2%80%9D-are-%E2%80%9Cthe-lightest%E2%80%9D/?refresh_ce.

^[7] See Reverend D. Paul Sullins, Ph.D., “Is Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse Related to Homosexual Priests?” available at http://www.ruthinstitute.org/clergy-sex-abuse-statistical-analysis

^[8] Courtney Grogan, “Ahead of Summit, Cupich discusses sex abuse, homosexuality, priestly formation,” Catholic News Agency (February 18, 2019), https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.catholicnewsagency.com/amp/news/ahead-of-summit-cupich-discusses-sex-abuse-homosexuality-priestly-formation-36025

^[9] Lisa Bourne, “‘Consensual’ Sex between Clergy and Adults ‘different’ than child sex abuse: Cupich,” LifeSite News (November 14, 2018), https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/consnsual-adult-clergy-sex-different-than-child-clergy-abuse-cdl.-cupich

^[10] E.g., see Jeffrey Tranzillo, “Did Maltese Archbishop Propose a Preferential Option for Gays?”, Crisis Magazine (March 26, 2019), www.crisismagazine.com/2019/did-maltese-archbishop-propose-a-preferential-option-for-gays

^[11] “Text of Pope Francis’s Closing Remarks at Vatican’s Summit Against Abuse,” Catholic Standard (February 25, 2019), https://cathstan.org/news/us-world/text-of-pope-franciss-closing-remarks-at-vaticans-summit-against-abuse

^[12] See Sullins, pp. 39-41.

February 12, 2019March 15, 2019

Ecclesial Modernism

The “Experience” of Modernism

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January 10, 2019February 6, 2019

Saving Mysteries of the Christmas Season

by Jeff Tranzillo

“I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’” (Ps. 2:7). The psalmist is referring here to Israel’s messianic king. As God’s anointed one, he is God’s “son.” The person of this messiah is supremely fulfilled, of course, in Jesus Christ (Acts 4:26-27). He is begotten as the Son of God the Father in the everlasting “today” of eternity: God from God, light from light. When eternal Light begets Light eternally, the Son-Light “turns” eternally toward the Source, toward the Father, in Love. The Holy Spirit is the personal expression of this mutual love of Father and Son, proceeding eternally from both. Together with their Spirit, the Father and the Son are eternally bound in an incomparable and ineffable communion of love, united consubstantially as one God.

The Father has also begotten His Son on a particular “today” in time, when “the power of the Most High” overshadowed Mary of Nazareth, and she conceived that same, divine Son as man. It belongs to the very identity of this Son to be the only begotten one; therefore, His self-revelation in time, as man, requires that He be the only begotten of His mother, as He is of His Father. Jesus had therefore no siblings born of His ever virgin mother. The mystery of the Father’s eternally begetting the Son of God grounds the mystery of His incarnation as the Son of man, Our God and Savior Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate at Christmas.

Since the eternal Son of the Father and the Son of Mary are one and the same Person, it follows that Jesus Christ, the Son incarnate, would express His eternal begottenness of the Father, and toward the Father, in a way corresponding to the humanity He received from His mother, by God’s power and her gracious consent. For only then would the Son’s expression of Himself in and through His human nature be genuinely revelatory of who He is eternally.

And so it is that Jesus’s perfect obedience to the will of His heavenly Father manifests temporally the Son’s eternal embrace of the Father in the Love of their Spirit. In that sense, Jesus’s every act of obedience to the Father’s will is a concrete actualization, in time, of His eternal begottenness. Through His obedience, the incarnate Son affirms anew His eternal, filial relation of love for the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It follows, therefore, that Christ’s obedience both reflects and confirms the Father’s begetting Him “today,” the Father’s establishing eternally His paternal relation of love for His only Son, in the Spirit.

Since all things temporal are transitory, the incarnate Son expresses, and thus reveals to us, His eternal relation of begottenness-of-and-toward-the-Father through constant acts of filial obedience. The evangelists have recorded the most momentous of these. We recall and celebrate them during the Christmas Season and Holy Week. The Easter Season, on the other hand, recalls and celebrates their glorious results. As we are still celebrating the Christmas Season, let us consider briefly three of the “revelatory mysteries” that we celebrate therein, concerning the incarnate Son’s obediential expression of His eternal begottenness.

The Incarnation

We have already spoken much about the Incarnation. The Son “comes forth” from the Father eternally as God, as light from light; therefore, it is the Son who “comes forth” from the Father, in the fullness of time, to redeem us as man–indeed, as the God-Man: the Word became flesh. “To be begotten” is a revelation of who the Son is eternally. So, in the Spirit of love, the Father sends the Son to us and for us, as one of us, through His begetting in a human mother, Mary.

The revelation of God’s saving love for us in the Incarnation, and the fact of the Incarnation itself–God’s becoming man in the Person of the Son–reveal with unparalleled power and clarity our inherent dignity as human beings. Jesus Christ was born to us, one holy night, to restore in us the divine image in which we had been created, but which we marred by sin. “Long lay the world/ in sin and error pining/ till He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”

In the Incarnation, the Father prepared “a body” (Heb. 10:5–i.e., a human nature, body and soul) for the Son, through which He would express His obedience–and so, too, His filial relation–to the Father: “Behold, I have come to do your will” (Heb. 10:7). The Father willed but one thing, toward which Jesus’s whole earthly life was directed with unwavering fidelity: that through the eternal Spirit (Heb. 9:14), the Son should offer His sinless humanity to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins. His offering Himself to the Father was, therefore, at once an offering also for us, for our sanctification (Heb. 10:8-14).

So, in the obedience of the incarnate Son to the Father, their eternal relation of mutual love in the Spirit is revealed, together with their saving love for us. We are, after all, the ones for whose sake the Father sent the Son “in the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7). What is more, their undying love for us, as expressed in the gift of the divine baby who would grow up specifically to die for us, reveals the incalculable value that God has placed on each of us. This is what we celebrate on Christmas Day. This we ought to celebrate, in humble gratitude, every day.

The Holy Family: Finding the Child Jesus in the Temple

When Jesus was twelve years old, Mary and Joseph took Him to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. As the pilgrims departed after the feast, He stayed behind in the temple, without His parents’ knowing it: “Zeal for your house consumes me” (Ps. 69:9). During the three days it took them to find Him, He listened to the rabbis, holding His own among them. He posed questions and answered them, exhibiting an amazing level of understanding.

When His anxious parents finally found Him, His mother asked Him why He had done this to them. In all innocence, He asked them, in turn, why they had to search for Him: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Lk. 2:49), as if to say, “Where else would I be?” It seems that Mary and Joseph had not yet recognized the divine identity of Jesus, which gave Mary pause to ponder His reply in her heart.

Jesus, on the other hand, knew well that He is eternally the only begotten Son of the Father, whose will He had come to fulfill in perfect obedience, as the perfect, human expression of His filial begottenness. The implication is clear: it was the mysterious will of the Father Himself that Jesus should remain behind in the temple and interact with the rabbis. Expressing His filial relation to His divine Father through perfect obedience to His will took precedence over His relationship with Mary His mother, and Joseph her husband, the devoted guardian of Jesus. “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me, and to accomplish His work” (Jn. 4:34). By remaining behind in the temple, therefore, Jesus was nourishing Himself on that food. In the meantime, His heavenly Father would provide for Mary and Joseph, and for all else.

Then why, we might ask, did Jesus return to Nazareth with His parents and remain obedient to them thereafter? Had He not been obedient to them before? Disobedience on the part of Jesus is out of the question. He is the divine Person of the eternal Son. As such, He is impeccable, even in His human nature.

What is more, there could be no real conflict between the good that the Father wills His Son to accomplish relative to His salvific mission, and the good that the Father wills Him to accomplish relative to His parents. It follows, therefore, that Jesus had in no way failed in His filial duty toward Mary and Joseph.

The reason, then, why Jesus returned to Nazareth with His parents, and was obedient to them, is because they undoubtedly expressed their will that He do so. And He understood that their will was harmonious with that of His heavenly Father–indeed, an expression of it, here and now. The Father would have the Son sanctify everyday family life by having Him lead an everyday family life, during His “hidden” years, with Mary and Joseph, in conformity with the reciprocal obligations of parents and their children entailed in the Fourth Commandment. The Holy Family is holy precisely because its members fulfilled that Commandment perfectly, both individually and collectively, in accordance with the Father’s will.

The Baptism of Jesus

John the Baptist preached repentance, and the people went out to him to be baptized in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. He was thus preparing a people well-disposed for the One who, though ranking ahead of him and existing before him, would come after him (Jn. 1:30). When Jesus presented Himself to John to be baptized, John sought to prevent Him, acknowledging his own need to be baptized by Jesus; however, Jesus explained that “it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness” (Mt. 3:15), meaning, “It is the will of my heavenly Father, who is now consummating His covenant with Israel in and through me.” So John relented.

When John baptized Jesus, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended on Him in the form of a dove, and the voice of the Father spoke. According to Matthew and Mark, the Father declared, “This is [or, You are] my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” According to ancient versions of Luke, the Father declared, “You are my beloved Son; today I have begotten you.” Both renderings are significant, and eminently compatible. They agree in beginning with the words of Psalm 2:7. Luke completes the verse, whereas Matthew and Mark combine its first words with words selected from the opening of Isaiah’s first servant song (Is. 42:1).

Both the kingly figure in Psalm 2, and the servant of God in Isaiah, are endowed with the Spirit– the king implicitly, as he is the LORD’s anointed (Ps. 2:2), and the servant explicitly: “I have put my Spirit upon him” (Is. 42:1). God has given his servant as a covenant to the people and a light to the nations (Is. 42:6; 49:6, 8). The servant will fulfill that mission through agonizing suffering, as an offering for sin. But God will vindicate him, and many will become righteous because of him (Is. 50:5-9; 52:13-53:12). Indeed, God will exalt him to a very high degree, and kings will be silent on his account (Is. 52: 13-15; 49:6-7). This suggests that the servant will, in the end, surpass them all in power and glory–in kingliness. It seems, then, that the suffering servant and the LORD’s anointed are one and the same person. The evangelists are telling us that this Person is Jesus Christ.

The incarnate Son is the very embodiment of God’s covenant with His people–of the “marriage” of God and man. His obedience to the Father’s will in being baptized by John fulfills the very righteousness of God, for in and through the Son, on whom the Spirit has come to rest, the Father is fulfilling the covenant with Israel by which He will redeem her and make her His own. The Son’s fidelity to the Father compensates superabundantly for Israel’s history of covenantal infidelity.

It seems reasonable to suppose that the Father had the Son, though free of all sin, undergo John’s baptism of repentance in order, as our Head, to take our sins on Himself, and to make a perfect act of repentance for them on our behalf. This was a decisive step toward His making possible the forgiveness of our sins in reality, by water and the Spirit, and not just symbolically, as John was doing, by water alone. The Father was “well pleased” with the Son’s perfect act of obedience to His will. Jesus’s baptism thus signified His perfect filial love for the Father, whose voice from heaven revealed, in the “today” of time, His ever begetting the Son in the “today” of eternity.

While the Son took on our sins at His baptism and repented of them fully, an expiatory act of reparation was still necessary: the Lamb of God had yet to take away the sin of the world (Jn. 1:29). His “anointing” by the Spirit, at His baptism, revealed publicly that the humanity of Christ was “confirmed” with the fullness of grace necessary to realize that act, in gracious obedience to the Father’s will. Hence, the baptism of Jesus inaugurated the public ministry that would lead Him, inexorably, to the cross.

By the atoning sacrifice of His own life for our transgressions, Jesus would justify many. At the same time, His agony–the agony of God–on the cross would expose: (1) the vile and violently evil nature of our sins; (2) their injustice to God above all; and (3) the necessity of their being justly punished and expiated.

Since all the attributes we ascribe to God separately are really one and the same in Him, we also see in the cross, which divine justice demanded, the overflowing mercy that the Father extends to us through His innocent Son. In perfect obedience to the Father, Our Lord was willing to endure the cross–an incomparable injustice against him–in place of, and for the sake of, the guilty, the ones deserving of death. We sinners, thus spared, would consequently gain, through the superabundant merit of Christ, the offer of forgiveness for our sins, and, through the grace of forgiveness, the grace of becoming partakers in the divine life.

By our accepting the transformative grace that Jesus won for us, He is “begotten” in us, such that we may call His Father our Father. Through the Son and in the Spirit, we must express our filial love for the Father by living a life of humble, uncompromising obedience to His saving will. It is precisely this that the Father has willed to accomplish in and through His obedient Son, born for us in Bethlehem, and born in us through baptism and the other sacraments. So, when the Son reveals Himself, and His Father, and their Spirit to us each Christmas, He means thereby also to reveal to us who we can be, and who we ought to be, by the grace of adoption into the trinitarian family of God.

October 29, 2018November 2, 2018

Episcopally Sanctioned Adultery

Is There Such a Thing as Episcopally Sanctioned Adultery? The Attack on Marriage, Morality, and the Eucharist

Please follow link to post on Homiletic and Pastoral Review

October 9, 2018November 2, 2018

Instrumentum Laboris Promotes the Ecclesial Gay Agenda

Instrumentum Laboris Promotes the Ecclesial Gay Agenda

Please follow link to post on Crisis Magazine

August 30, 2018October 12, 2018

Actions Speak Louder than Words: Pope Francis’s Response to the Allegations of Archbishop Viganò

by Jeff Tranzillo

On August 28, LifeSite News published an article citing Bishop Robert Morlino’s “disappointment that in his remarks on the return flight from Dublin to Rome, the Holy Father chose a course of ‘no comment,’ regarding any conclusions that might be drawn from Archbishop Viganò’s allegations,” three days earlier, concerning the gay network and the gay cover-up at the highest levels of the Church. With all due respect to this courageous bishop, I believe that Pope Francis might, indeed, have commented on the allegations–loudly–giving faithful Catholics an even bigger reason for disappointment.

As LifeSite News also reported, again, on August 28, the pope named pro-gay Cardinal Joseph Tobin, who heads the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, as a delegate to the upcoming synod in Rome on youth. The synod’s instrumentum laboris speaks of “LGBT youth” who want to form homosexual relationships, while still remaining close to the Church. In consequence–and even well before the instrumentum was published–faithful Catholics have been bracing themselves for the commandeering of the youth synod by gay-friendly clerics, who, by recourse to Amoris Laetitia’s unprincipled principles, will use the synod as an opportunity to push the Church toward changing her teaching on sexual morality in general, and on homosexuality in particular. Tobin’s formidable size and intimidating scowl are naturally suited to quelling the opposition. Archbishop Viganò’s testimony states that Tobin owes his present appointment as Newark’s ordinary, in large part, to his predecessor, disgraced ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why McCarrick would have been so keen to have him in that position.

It seems, then, that the pope’s handpicking Tobin as a delegate to the youth synod might itself have been his in-your-face response to Viganò’s allegations. Not only will Francis not confront the gay free-for-all in the Church by disciplining or dismissing gay and gay-promoting clerics: he will foster it. He will see to it that clerics of just this type are in place to exploit every opportunity to promote the gay cause, as they did at the synods on the family held in 2014 and 2015, and as they also did, with devilish subtlety, in Amoris Laetitia, the rotten fruit of those two synods. The youth synod provides one more such opportunity. The whole concept of this synod seems to have been contrived, and its preparatory phase manipulated, for the express purpose of corrupting youth; and, through corrupted youth, Church teaching as well.

Francis and his pack of wolves will therefore continue laying the primary blame for clerical sexual abuse at the feet of clericalism, while denying its homosexual root. In that way, they can move ahead with their agenda to “welcome” and to “integrate” active homosexuals into the Church. They are thus inviting the very element responsible for most cases of clerical sexual abuse to spread throughout the Body of Christ. In consequence, everyone–especially the innocent and the vulnerable–will be in greater danger of exploitation and corruption by the swelling presence of unrepentant sexual perverts, who have little aptitude for, or interest in, self-control and moral decency.

This evil and subversive scheme cannot be reconciled with a serious intention on the part of the pope or like-minded bishops to address the problem of clerical sexual abuse in the Church. We can only conclude, then, that they are not serious about addressing it. They will therefore continue to stock the seminaries with sexually perverted or psychosexually abnormal males who have little chance of, or incentive for, integrating their sexuality manfully into their person, so as to live an unfailingly chaste, celibate, and priestly life by God’s grace, in accordance with God’s loving plan for His Church. The pope will be content, it seems, merely to issue apologies occasionally, as he did last week in Ireland, for the devastating personal wreckage caused by clerical sexual abuse.

Is the preceding assessment unfair? Is the new role assigned to Tobin, the timing of its announcement, and all that the appointment implies really the pope’s defiant response to the Viganò allegations?

At present, we cannot say for sure; nevertheless, some things are luminously clear. Pope Francis has consistently appointed and surrounded himself with gay-friendly bishops and priests, at least some of whom we can be forgiven for suspecting are gay–that is, sodomitic–themselves. Archbishop Viganò has named some of the relevant names in his testimony. Two others, Cardinals Godfried Danneels and Walter Kasper, were members of the St. Gallen mafia, which succeeded in getting Bergoglio elected to the papacy. As stated above, these wolves, together with the rest of the pack, are promoting the gay agenda under Francis with impunity–humanly speaking, of course.

What is more, the pope seems more inclined to reward bishops who cover up sexual abuse than to discipline them. One striking example is his 2015 appointment of Bishop Juan Barros Madrid to the diocese of Osorno, Chile. Francis wholly disregarded loud and sustained protests that Barros had covered up–indeed, witnessed–the sexual abuse crimes of his friend and mentor, Father Fernando Karadima, whom the Holy See disciplined in 2011. Francis seems, in that case, to have heeded instead the counsel of his friend and C9 member, Cardinal Javier Errázuriz Ossa, who is himself implicated in the same cover-up. The pope was finally forced to accept Barros’s resignation last June, after an investigation by Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu verified the credibility of the victims’ claims.

We have also the example of the pope’s rehabilitating Cardinals Godfried Danneels and Roger Mahoney, both of whom are long known to have covered up for clerical sexual abusers. And in view of Archbishop Viganò’s testimony, it now seems that the pope had also rehabilitated ex-Cardinal McCarrick, who has bragged about his prominent role in lobbying for Bergoglio’s election to the papacy. Was his restoration to the world stage the pope’s reward to him for a job well done?

Joseph Tobin, who, according to Viganò, acquired his present office with McCarrick’s help, is himself implicated in having covered up for the disgraced ex-cardinal. It was only when the Archdiocese of New York revealed in June that a credible charge of pederasty had been brought against McCarrick that Tobin, by then at Newark’s helm for well over a year, acknowledged the existence of a settlement between the Newark archdiocese and a former seminarian whom McCarrick had sexually abused. Nevertheless, Tobin’s cover-up has clearly not discouraged Pope Francis from naming him as a delegate to October’s youth synod. On the contrary, the cardinal’s steadfast allegiance to the gay cause seems to be what qualified him to serve in that capacity.

Within a few months after having taken over the Archdiocese of Newark in January 2017, Tobin gave his approval for a gay pilgrimage, including Mass, to take place in the cathedral. The event materialized on May 21 of that year. Though he could not stay for the entire event, Tobin was on hand to introduce himself to the group of openly gay and lesbian pilgrims, announcing, “I am Joseph, your brother.” He then qualified that declaration in terms of his being, like each of them, “a disciple of Jesus” and “a sinner who finds mercy in the Lord”; however, one is still hard pressed not to take his remark as possibly intended to signal something more. At the very least, he was grossly imprudent not to have considered how loaded it was, under the circumstances.

While Tobin has enthusiastically defended Amoris Laetitia, which lurked in the background as providing him with the rationale for “welcoming,” to the cathedral, people who identify openly as gay or lesbian, he went beyond even the most radical interpretations of the document. Disregarding its prerequisites of “accompaniment” and “discernment,” he allowed the “pilgrims,” some of whom were “married” to same-sex “spouses,” to be welcomed unconditionally to receive Holy Communion.

Rather than encourage the pilgrims to live chastely, Tobin thought it appropriate, on this occasion, simply to “call them who they were.” This is particularly significant relative to the upcoming youth synod that the pope wants him to attend. For it suggests that he will “affirm” the youth in the L, G, B, T, or other “identity” that they claim for themselves. If he does, in fact, indulge and encourage that death-dealing lie among the youth at the synod, then he will be guilty of causing scandal by tempting young people to sin, or to remain in sin. He will also be guilty of inflicting serious, psychological abuse on vulnerable youth.

As Tobin sees it, however, the real problem is the fear young people have that the Church “judges them.” His twisted approach to the “same-sex” issue seems to coincide with the subversive plan of the late Cardinal Carlo Martini, a member of the St. Gallen mafia, who wanted to exploit youth as the revolutionary means by which to advance the homosexual agenda in the Church. Tobin and Francis seem to be of one mind in their determination to fulfill Martini’s infernal plan.

We might add other evidence of Pope Francis’s favor toward gay and gay-minded clerics, and of the virtually free reign he gives them to promote, celebrate, and travel the gay path to perdition. But we will stop here to ask the following question: How does all this square with the pope’s remark, during an audience with Italian bishops last May, that it would be better for them not to admit active homosexuals or males having deep-seated homosexual tendencies into the seminary? His bizarre self-contradiction here, as in so many other instances, is not easily explained.

It is telling, however, that Francis did not deliver his remark during the televised part of his audience, but only during his closed-door meeting with the bishops afterward. Why did he not make his point publicly and direct it, not just to the group of Italian bishops before him, but also to all the bishops of the universal Church, for whom his message–which coincides with Church teaching–is just as urgent? After all, that message, if taken seriously, is crucial to addressing the crisis of clerical sexual abuse.

Significantly, the pope’s remark came just four days after the whole body of Chilean bishops handed him their resignations in the wake of Bishop Scicluna’s twenty-three-hundred-page report on the sexual abuse crisis in Chile. Did his words to the Italian bishops constitute a heartfelt, perhaps spontaneous personal plea for due discretion in choosing future seminarians, now that the nature and scope of the problem of homosexual clergy has finally penetrated his awareness?

If so, the pope’s appointing Joseph Tobin to attend the youth synod seems inexplicable. But let us explore one of several possibilities.

In 2005, and again in 2013, the St. Gallen mafia conspired to get none other than Cardinal Bergoglio elected to the papacy. Its members must consequently have known him personally, or at least known a whole lot about him. Indeed, “mafia” members Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Carlo Martini were his friends and enthusiastic promoters. Bergoglio evidently measured up as being on the same page with the group, particularly with Martini, whose vision of the Church manifestly informs his own. What does that imply?

Of the clerics that we know to have belonged to the Gallen cabal, several, Martini among them, are famous for their radical opposition to Church teachings and practices–especially in the area of sexual morality. If Bergoglio “measured up” to them, then that would suggest he is cut from the same cloth. The “mafia” would then be able to count on him to “modernize” the Church in such a way as to serve their foul, revolutionary objectives.

Conscious, willful rejection of the Church’s teachings invariably entails grave, practical consequences for the person who rejects them–the Catholic above all. It follows that the Gallen gang and their papal candidate–who, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, was known for his ambiguity, his doctrinal and moral apathy, his protection of clerical sexual abusers, his morally suspect clerical retinue, and his “pastoral” bypassing of Church disciplinary practices–must have all seriously compromised themselves, whether in their personal life, or in carrying out their priestly ministry. In a word, they must all have been unfaithful to Christ and His Body. This would have given rise to four types of “loyalty” among them in their ecclesiastical collaboration:

1. a utilitarian loyalty, where birds of a feather conspire together to achieve one or another of their corrupt goals.

2. a pseudo-solidarity loyalty, where birds of a feather live it up together, doing favors for, and covering for, one another.

3. a guilty-conscience loyalty, where none of these birds is inclined to denounce or expose the misdeeds of any of the others, since he knows he’s guilty of the same transgressions himself, or of others just as serious. In consequence, they can each get away with murder.

4. a constrained loyalty, where these birds of a feather, who will either sink or swim together, are compelled–despite their differences–to act together. Each of them knows that he can get away with murder, and that the others have no choice but to help him pull the trigger.

Any of these types of “loyalty,” or any combination thereof, could explain why the pope has gone out of his way to conceal the disgraceful actions and cover-ups perpetrated by certain clerics. It could explain why he seems so often to reward vice rather than virtue. It could explain why he consistently fails to identify and to denounce genuinely grave sins according to what they really are. And it could explain why he continues promoting the gay agenda, even though he seems to have expressed a personal concern–albeit privately–about the problems that can arise when active homosexuals and homosexually inclined individuals are admitted to the seminary, and then later ordained as priests. While self-contradiction and concealing his hand are his signature trademarks, and we cannot discount the possibility that the pope’s brief, private comment to the Italian bishops was just one more of his red herrings, the comment seems, nevertheless, too gratuitous not to have some merit. Was he not at liberty, then, to utter it publicly?

In view of the above, it is not unreasonable for us to consider that Pope Francis might be seriously compromised. His being in a compromised position would determine everything he says and does–or can say and do–as pope. To take a recent example: On his flight home from Ireland last Sunday, the pope spoke in an interview about the possibility of psychiatry helping children who manifest homosexual tendencies. Sometime after the statement appeared on its official website, the Vatican deleted the reference to psychiatry. Someone behind the scenes evidently decided that it didn’t fit in with the gay-is-normal narrative issuing from the highest levels. The pope had not requested the change himself, for the Vatican spokeswoman who sought to justify the deletion indicated that someone else had divined what the pope really thought about the matter, and then altered the text accordingly. So, Francis was not consulted at all. Had he previously given the powers that be carte blanche to edit him unilaterally? Or, did they simply know that he would have no choice but to acquiesce, even if someone had bothered to consult him? After all, birds of this feather are bound to remain dirty together.

Let me now summarize what I have argued herein. To begin with, Pope Francis’s verbal silence about Archbishop Viganò’s allegations of a homosexual cabal in the Church, and in the Vatican itself, might not have been his “last word” on the matter. Within days, the pope seems to have responded in a practical way by shining the spotlight on Joseph Tobin, the “gay-is-good” cardinal, whom he named as a delegate to the upcoming youth synod. If the appointment was more than just an ill-timed coincidence, such that Francis really did intend, by his action, to make a statement, he would be saying something like this: Allegations or no allegations, it’s business as usual at the Vatican. The gay subversion of souls and of the Church will continue.

But the question is, was this the pope’s own strategy, or, if another’s, was he fully in accord with it? Did he act unilaterally to signal his defiance of Viganò’s allegations, or did the power players surrounding him script this drama—as well as his recent statement ascribing the cause of the clerical homosexual scandal to “clericalism”—and hand him the part he had to play, regardless of whether he was fully committed to it?

Since the time he reviewed the Scicluna report, it is possible that Pope Francis has become uncomfortable ignoring (as he allegedly did in his former diocese) the fact that the problem of clerical sexual abuse is mainly a homosexual one; however, it is crucial to the success of the gay agenda to suppress that damning fact. How, then, might the pope’s retinue keep him in check, if he is no longer of a mind to deny the pederastic nature of the current Church crisis, but would rather seek to address it?

While his Vatican handlers had no choice but to let him act in the high profile Barros and McCarrick cases, they might nevertheless have reminded Francis of the obvious: he cannot very well adopt a general policy of investigating, exposing, and dismissing from office, bishops guilty of covering up for pederastic priests. For he himself has just been accused of covering up for McCarrick. If the accusation is true–and his inner circle surely knows whether it’s true–then he would be condemning himself to the same fate. With the sword of Damocles thus set in place, the pope’s merry little band of prima donnas can go on prancing along to pursue the gay subversion of the Church, while prevailing on him to cooperate with them.

Of course, the immensely evil schemes that wicked ecclesiastical leaders are systematically carrying out in the Church, and the hidden culture of evil by which they secure the cooperation they need to accomplish their designs, surely run deeper than anyone can know before the time when God Himself reveals all that is now concealed in darkness. That the evildoers do not fear that day, or Him who has the power to cast both body and soul into hell, is a testimony to their spiritual blindness and unbelief.

The simple sketch given above provides, perhaps, a small part of the big picture–a possible scenario. There are other possible ways to explain Pope Francis’s inconsistent, self-contradictory, manipulative, and rebellious behavior; for example, the habitual equivocation, perhaps even duplicity, that seems to govern and disguise that behavior might bespeak some form of psychological and emotional instability (indeed, a remarkably Luther-like form). If that is the case, then only God knows whether the pope is blameless for his condition, or whether he brought it on and exacerbated it by his own sins.

But whether the factors affecting his conduct are internal or external or a combination of these, the end result is the same: Pope Francis does not seem fully at liberty to act consistently for the true good of the Church. Nevertheless, if, out of pure self-interest, he is capitulating mainly to pressure from the outside not to act as he knows he ought to; or, if he has committed himself to collaborating with an evil agenda to accommodate the Church to an ungodly world: then he is abusing his own freedom. He is compromised, dirty. He and his retinue.

trulycatholicmatters.com

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Actions Speak Louder than Words: Pope Francis’s Response to the Allegations of Archbishop Viganò