'The post-Christian pope is rapidly making Rome pagan again'

The worst thing about not having read the UK papers daily for almost 20 years is the deaths one doesn't know about. Almost all our great men are now dead (I am not feeling so well myself) including Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the liberal candidate for the papacy in 1978 and 2005, though I am not sure if he was that great.

His obituary in the Daily Telegraph, the best place in the world for obituaries, contains this surprising passage.

"Reports in the Italian media claimed that he had received a significant number of votes in the initial rounds of balloting in the conclave; but a diary kept by an unidentified cardinal suggested that Martini was never a serious candidate, and that the only rival to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was another conservative, the Argentine Jorge Maria Bergoglio — like Martini, a Jesuit (there has never been a Jesuit Pope)."

Cardinal Martini said in 2012, in an interview published the day before he died,

"The church is 200 years behind the times. Why doesn't it stir? Are we afraid? Is it fear rather than courage?" 

He is right, non-Catholic readers will say and many Catholics too. 

But modernism, condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, is the heresy that the Church should adapt to the world, not the world to the church. 

A lovely old priest I knew, Father Jean-Marie Charles-Roux, told me that both Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, the latter having been a close friend of his, were guilty of this heresy. 

Without going that far, some cardinals unfortunately are.

And other heresies too. 

You don't need to be a historian of religion or even clever to know that statues of naked women 'symbolising life' are not Catholic and are pagan. Yet the distinguished Austen Ivereigh, who seem to have lost his reason such is his anger at the stealing of the Amazonian statues, has gone so far as to tweet this.





He knows very well that worship of Mother Earth is diametrically opposed to Christian worship of God the Father, so what is he trying to do?

Mr Ivereigh refers to the former party girl now ardent Catholic, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis ('TNT'), as part of the 'Church of Schism', although she seems to be an utterly orthodox Catholic, very much more so than he is.  (The only people who talk of schism are the Pope and the liberals.) She is close to Steve Bannon and she incensed Mr Ivereigh and the liberals by saying recently the 

"only two people in the world today making sense: Donald Trump and Cardinal Mueller." 

Liberals do not mind heresy but they will not tolerate admiring Donald Trump.

Cardinal Mueller's comment on the statues is:

"The great mistake was to bring the idols into the Church not to put them out, because according to the Law of God Himself – the First Commandment – idolatry is a grave sin and not to mix them with the Christian liturgy."

I have not seen TNT criticise the Pope. She contented herself by saying that he does not sing her favourite hits first. 

If Mr Ivereigh accused George Neumayr of schism he'd be unfair, but he'd have lots of ammunition, like this article The Post-Christian Pope and the Pacha Idols, from which I quote:

"I have lost track of the number of times Pope Francis has given the finger to orthodox Catholics — from telling the parents of large families that they needn’t behave like “rabbits” to mocking an altar boy for holding his hands together piously (He joked to the bewildered boy, “Are they stuck together?”) to calling priests who adhere to tradition “neurotics.” In Jorge Bergoglio, the world has witnessed its first post-Christian pope — a UN-style religious relativist who loves every religion except his own. 

"The Amazonian Synod is part of a plan by the Pope to make very far ranging changes to the Church - married priests are coming and even women priests are spoken of, despite Pope John Paul II's interdiction of them in perpetuity. Worshipping Mother Earth, though, would mean going further even than those steps."

"....The post-Christian pope is rapidly making Rome pagan again."

Cardinal Martini had an unfailing courtesy and elegance. The present Pope, it would be fair to say, unfortunately does not.

The whole article cries out to be quoted. Here is some more.

"Only a dilettantish modern Jesuit like Francis would have the gall to present this synod, which is a monumental act of manipulation and condescension, as a blow against “Western colonialism.” In truth, it is simply a new and far sicker form of it: the cross has been replaced by the blue flag of the UN. In its shadow, an alliance of UN creeps and heretical Vatican officials will let the Amazonians play with their little Pacha idols as long as they give up their political power to Brave New World bureaucrats. The last thing they want is for Amazonians to order their own affairs. And unlike the Catholic missionaries of old, the new colonialists of the UN seek not to liberate primitives from perversions like infanticide but to introduce them to new ones — Planned Parenthood sex ed programs, gender-neutral bathrooms, abortion on demand, eugenics, euthanasia, ubiquitous porn, and countless other modern forms of degradation."

A straw in the wind is a tweet on Wednesday from Father James Martin, a favourite of the Pope, who has been attracting huge publicity for his campaign against homophobia in the Church. He likes to blur lines but had, till Wednesday, always maintained that he agrees with Catholic teaching, while simply calling for more compassion for homosexuals.  But now:

‘Where the Bible mentions [same-sex sexual] behavior at all, it clearly condemns it. I freely grant that. The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct. The Bible sanctioned slavery as well and nowhere attacked it as unjust. Are we prepared to argue today that slavery is biblically justified?’

He has a point about slavery, which is clearly willed by God in the Old Testament and was approved 150 years ago by Pope Pius IX. 

For obedient Catholics and for intelligent Christians, the conclusion might be that slavery is a relative but not an absolute evil. 


But some will draw another conclusion, that the Church has moral teaching wrong except where it aligns with a modern, preferably  left-of-centre, point of view.

See the definition of modernism above.

I am not seeking to argue that slavery in ante-bellum America was a good thing, though monasteries in the American South kept slaves. I mean that it was a useful institution in Old Testament times.

This essay argues the case for this point of view.

But to accept this would mean believing once again in a God who wills hierarchy, not social equality, submission to lawful authority not the ideas of the French revolution.

The modernists in the reign of Pope St Pius X were priests who held that the dogmas, the teachings of the Church which her children are required to believe, can evolve over time – not only in their expression but also in their substance  For this reason modernism was condemned by St Pius X as "the synthesis of all heresies". 

The priests were unfrocked and had to earn their living as best they could, in some cases as waiters. The Second Vatican Council resuscitated their ideas.

Readers might accuse me of modernism in respect of slavery, though I plead not guilty.