I am a little concerned, and a little amused, some of my parishioners have been paying their three quid to join in the Labour leadership election and all of them are voting for Jeremy Corbyn. It amuses me that Labour could be so daft as to open up their leadership to all and sundry, and that they are so naive about human nature. It concerns me, just a little, that some of my parishioners are taking advantage of this naivete, their own politics are either darker blue Tory or even UKIP! Taking advantage of someone's stupidity seems to be a movement to sinfulness. Yet Labour are following the Left Wing trend, it is their on the Right too, that we are not what we are but what we decide to be.It suspect it is all those teachers telling children, 'You can be whatever you want to be'.
'I am what I decide I am', seems to be a growing strain in society. 'Gender theory' at its most extreme says despite having male genitalia, if I so decide, I can be a woman this afternoon, and a man again by tea-time. Feminists (and Catholics) might object strongly and ask how that is possible; as I have never had a period in my life, or suffered discrimination because of my sex, nor have I experienced the longings and disappointments that women do nor do the experience my masculine ones. They would say that even if I had longed to be a woman all my life, even if I mutilated myself and had plastic surgery, even if I spent the rest of my life being continually pumped with female hormones, I could still not be a woman, just a man with problems. Gender theorists would simply respond, 'I can be whatever I want to be!' and the argument stops,
The same kind of madness exists in the Church and is coming to the fore as we approach the Synod. See today's Vatican Monday post. What is really being said is that there is no objective truth, everything is relative. 'I am what I decide I am' sounds painfully close to 'I am who I am' the normal translation of YHWH, the name of God, which belongs to God alone.
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| Bolivia 2015;Mass celebrated by His Holiness in the Nunciature L'Osservatore Romano |
It is this, the very nature of God himself, that is up for grabs at the Synod. It is not just marriage, it is not only the Holy Eucharist, or even Divine Revelation but God that is under attack. What it is about is the apostasy of the Church and who is at the centre of the Church; God or Man?
18 comments:
D.Q. McInerny makes a very similar point in an essay entitled "Refashioning Reality": "There is a war on, a war of truly monumental proportions, for it is being waged against reality itself. This war which we are now witnessing, which, indeed, we are very much caught up in, is most unusual for the fact that only one party to the conflict, human beings, is doing the fighting;d the other party, reality, is not lifting a finger because it has no need to; its victory is assured, and in fact it was a foregone conclusion even before the first shot was fired. It is human beings who have unilaterally declared war on reality. in what precisely does the war consist, what is it all about? It boils down to this: the aggressors have made the determination, quite irrationally, to repudiate the way things actually are, and are committed to the Pickwickian project of refashioning reality, that is to say, of reconstituting the way things are, so that they will then reflect their fantastic notions of the way they think things should be..." (the full essay appears in the July edition of the FSSP, USA district, "Fraternity Newsletter").
You can be a woman 'trapped in a man's body'and vice versa and the world will applaud you and seek to offer you a new body but you can't suffer same sex attraction and seek to change that. The latter is 'being unable to accept yourself', the former is 'impossible' but hey, let's pretend. Modernism is nothing if not inconsistent.
You write, Father, "It concerns me, just a little, that some of my parishioners are taking advantage of this naivete, their own politics are either darker blue Tory or even UKIP! Taking advantage of someone's stupidity seems to be a movement to sinfulness."
It seems to me to be quite legitimate (Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves. Matthew 10.16) to infiltrate a political party which supports abortion, whatever the political colour of that party may be.
It is a pity that no one infiltrated the Nazis, who were both stupid and evil.
I am one who was made in the image and likeness of God but I most certainly am not God. I have photographs of myself. They are in the image and likeness of me but they are not me. St. Paul tells us that when we get to heaven we will be like Him because we will see Him as He really IS. These teachings have their limitations because we will never be gods no matter how much we will be LIKE HIM. We are told that we belong to the Mystical Body of Christ if we have been baptised and are in a state of grace. Because of this the Holy Spirit dwells within us, but we are not the Holy Spirit. He dwells within us!
All of this can be confusing and can cause misunderstanding. This is quite obvious when we look around at some of those around us.
Father,
You're ahead of mine and my pre-occupation with the indirect attack on the Real Presence coming in the Synod. But I see you are right. We are dealing with something worse. An attack on God.
Secularists are obsessed with Lust, that is, Sex. The ads on the Telly now routinely show a degree of Lustful vulgarity which simply did not exist openly before. Yet all, including most, now, secularised Catholics, accept it without comment while waiting for the program to resume.
But Lust is not the Greatest Sin. Pride is. And that is what we have dealt with in the whole pre-and Post-Vatican II period, and now in the second session of the Synod. Pride is the sin of the Liberal/Relativists and their weapon of Gradualism as they seek to change what they believe the Church should believe. Their intent is to alter Truth.
They are as good as God and can decide for themselves.
Pride is what we are dealing with!
Sorry for being off topic, Father Blake, but I got a message when I went into your website, saying that if one used the site, information on one's said use would be sent to Google. Are you aware that data on a reader's use of your site is sent to Google? Have you agreed to this?
"It is this, the very nature of God himself, that is up for grabs at the Synod."
I knew you'd get there in the end, Fr.! ;) The same applies, of course, to all heresy - heresy is so dangerous because it involves the rejection of revealed reality or God in favour of an idea of a god which better suits our purposes because it is made in our own image and likeness.
Kasper is an out and out modernist and the paradigmatic key to understanding all his theology is that human experience and history are vehicles of revelation which trump Scripture and Tradition because they are the hermeneutical keys for interpreting Scripture and Tradition. All these ideas were roundly condemned by St Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, but as we know, under Francis, Kasper is restored to favour and everything is up for grabs - including the nature of God and revelation.
The reality that all Catholics need to come to terms with, and I think very few really have, is that we have a Pope who shows little or no evidence of having supernatural faith, and certainly there is not one drop of the fear of God in him. For him, everything is about politics and the wielding of absolute power in this life in order to exert his unholy will. He seems oblivious to the fact that there are eternal consequences for trashing that which is holy - whether it be doctrine practice or object. He plays fast and loose with Church teaching - one minute proclaiming he is a faithful son of the Church, and the next saying things that even he admits sound heretical. To him truth is an abstract phenomenon which is detached from the reality of peoples' lives, rather than being a divine person who is the core and ground of all being and with whom all people are called into a saving relationship - the only relationship which can spare them from eternal damnation. He castigates those who "seek doctrinal security" while he throws open the doors of consistories and synods to those who would cast doubt on every aspect of revealed, defined and infallible teaching.
We have, shock horror, another in the line of bad Popes who have led the Church close to the abyss before on those mercifully few occasions. He will do a lot more damage and destroy a lot more people's faith before he is dead, but not one of us is obliged or compelled to follow him and his beastly disciples on their merry road to hell. Nobody can compel us to believe falsehood or ambiguity or anything that is contrary to what the Church of God has always and everywhere believed. We can play the game of pretending that all is really well and he knows what he's doing - that he has a strategy that will turn out to be on the right side in the end - but that would be a bit like chopping off our genitals, chomping on some hormone tablets and claiming to be women.
Instead let us wage this war on the side of truth and reality (the foundations of unity) as God has called us to do, and expose the evil trans-reality which is inhabited by the nahash of Rome and his minions. God will prevail when He decides the time has come and the only question He will have for us is whether we have been faithful to Him.
Well Father, it really comes back to Original Sin and Lucifer’s “Non serviam!”. Pope Francis refers to Satan frequently, but people gloss over it and ignore his warnings. But the Devil’s influence is much more than the artistic image of him with horns and a tail which everyone would recognize as Evil.
Like C.S. Lewis’ depiction of Screwtape, he tempts us where we are, using our own weaknesses (“tendency to evil” – one of the effects of Original Sin) to gain a foothold. It is insidious and can come from any quarter under the appearance of ‘good’.
Thus we get laws approving or promoting evil under the guise of ‘equality’, ‘choice’, ‘human rights’ and so on – by people who seem to be sincere and concerned about the welfare of others. However, they are misled – either willfully or naively.
Lucifer’s message is still the same: “You can be gods” and do what you like. But Our Lord’s message was otherwise. We need to be god-like and do His will if we are to be saved and see Him “face to face”. Otherwise the ‘face’ we may see will have horns…
Lynda, I don't have a website, only this blog
Father: Thank you for that link to Vatican Monday Post which is important for the description of what came out of the May Shadow Synod in Rome. There are additional quotes from that meeting on Voice of the Family - in particular from the Pelletiere woman. For all the pseudo-intellectual fudge and nonsense the message is quite simple - "we should follow the world". Worldliness is what it is all about. The problem is that some of this nonsense has been interpolated into the Instrumentum Laboris for the 2015 session of the Synod on the family. See:
Instrumentum Laboris: Some Grave Concerns
on http://guildofblessedtitus.blogspot.co.uk/
(sorry to blow my own trumpet but it is important!)
What is new. "Glory to man in the highest for man is the master of things"?Swinburne.
I've sometimes thought that the 'gay' anthem 'i...am what i ammm, i am my owwn special creaaaationnnnn...' was just old nick having another mockery-moment at Divine revelation. And, happily for diablo, there are countless 'useful idiots' to stand on his stage.
Maybe we should get alien 'orb-theorists' and their ambitious surgeons to do some scalpel magic on the earth when it evinces Jupiter envy. Or vice versa.
PS. Deacon Augustine mentions "Pope Francis refers to Satan frequently...Like C.S. Lewis’ depiction of Screwtape." I would be interested if someone could explain to me the esteem for a man born and raised pre-VII, with many brilliant Catholic acquaintances, at a time when everyone's understanding of the Church was unadulterated in that her worship and doctrines had not been messed about (as happened in the 60s). And yet - Lewis (that dithering occultist) couldn't quite....commit...
Father, the old heresy that is having its new moment is Gnosticism: the idea that my will and 'spirit' can be separated from my base and beastly material body. We see it in the church, in politics and in the wider culture: what I want reality to be, it shall be and the truth is a relative concept. Add a hefty dash of sentimentalism and ther you have the modern, Western, worldview.
I have just come to the realization that I am actually the Pope in a lay-woman's body!! Woo-hoo! I say, take over the Vatican for me...git her done, boys!!
BACK TO THE FUTURE
"Diabolical Disorientation"
Meant only lost
In mans translation?
"Woo-hoo!" cried Callow,
"Way to reason...
It's not so bad, this silly-season."
Yet another insightful post Fr. Blake. You are a source of sanity in an upside down world. I am very grateful for your priesthood.
Jacobi, you are so right about "pride" being the greatest sin. And isn't it fascinating that the annual event that seeks to normalize all sexual ideologies calls itself the "Pride Parade".
Yes the assault is on the very nature of God in a very convoluted way - primarily it's about God providing sufficient Grace to stop sinning now - the Kasperites have to not merely say this is untrue butralso it is the legalistic merciless misguided Church that thinks God actually wants it rather than a sin-reduced Gradualism - Gradualism allows absolute pastoral free-rein to treat sinners as ongoing sinners rather than repenting ones - this allows national Churches to do whatever it wants as pastoral policy and sever itself from Rome & CDF directives regarding any moral issue - ie ostensible national Churches in material schism
..people seriously do not realize what is at stake at synod - gradualism is the rubicon - free pastoral autonomy means ultimately moral autonomy will follow - and once the code is severed the cult (liturgy & sacraments) and creed (doctrine itself) will follow - we're not merely talking schism but Babel act 2
An amusing detour: 'Frank advice 6', http://ignatiushisconclave.org
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