I have never been so sad, or felt more betrayed.

Ex-Nuncio Accuses Pope Francis of Failing to Act on McCarrick’s Abuse. 

The Holy Father venerated the relics of Matt Talbot today.

Pope Francis stops to pray before the relics of the Irish dock worker who overcame his alcohol addiction.

An alcoholic who, thanks to a vote, managed to overcome his addiction. Matt Talbot, a Dublin worker who died in the 1920s, receives the homage of Pope Francis who stops to venerate his relics in Our Lady’s Church in Lourdes, Dublin. Talbot was a drunkard during his youth: he worked on the harbor docks, he slurred and spent all his money on wine and beer, so that none of his friends or companions wanted to offer him more to drink.  Story here.

Venerable Matt Talbot pray for us and for those most in need of grace and mercy.

Pope Francis kissing a cross that belonged to Venerable Matt Talbot.
(Saturday 25th August 2018, 3:25 pm)

Never give up on the Bishops and the Pope ... better yet, never give up on Christ and His Church. (Edited)

The Holy Father will have much to suffer.

Pray for the Bishops to come together in a retreat of prayer.*

I'm convinced that it remains our duty to pray for and support our Bishops and the Holy Father.  No, I am not suggesting we sweep the scandals under the rug, but we have to be very careful about indicting every single priest and bishop as complicit in the cover ups and abuse itself.  That is absolutely not true, which is why it is extremely important to listen to good bishop, such as Bishop Paul Sirba, whose letter I publish before.  There are many priests and bishops coming forward, finally able to voice publicly what many have known for decades, the problem of a homosexual subculture within the Church, which influenced and in some cases, dictated the contemporary problem of clericalism and corruption being unmasked today.

Letter from Bishop Sirba:

I know the answer is Jesus Christ. Hope is found in the dying and rising of Jesus. The day of restoration and renewal will happen through the mercy of Jesus and our full cooperation in the work of the Redemption of Jesus Christ. I can also hear Jesus saying, “I’ve got this.” 

For the past five years, in a more intense way — the first revelations go back to the 1980s and 1990s — Catholics in the state of Minnesota have been exposed to the sins of the Church’s priests and bishops. Now the Church in Pennsylvania and across the nation has had to look at the horrendous sin of sexual abuse of minors and the failures of the Church in protecting the people of God, yet again. 

We need to name the shame, anger, and sadness. The sexual abuse of minors, episcopal failures, cover-ups and enabling behaviors, homosexual subcultures in the priesthood, and sins against celibacy must be confessed, rooted out, and repaired. To quote Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the USCCB, “We are faced with a spiritual crisis that requires not only spiritual conversion, but practical changes to avoid repeating the sins and failures of the past that are so evident in the recent report.” 

When it comes the crime of the abuse of minors, our hearts break open as sordid details call for independent investigations and the work of very trusted lay faithful to assist the bishops within the Church to remedy the problems. In the tumult, we must never lose our focus of providing healing for the victims and help for those who have been hurt and preventing this sin in the future. 

Our experience of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Diocese of Duluth is unique to us in some ways, but the underlying sinful human condition is universal and will be brought to light across our nation and our world. While we have been living with the crisis most recently through our bankruptcy, we have to be spiritually prepared for whatever new revelations may come to light in other parts of the Body of Christ, as well. 

This purification, although excruciatingly painful, is necessary for healing. The light of Christ scatters the darkness of sin and evil. 

The Scriptures that come to mind for me are: “It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke 17:2), the parable of the weeds among the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30), the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8:1-8). These and other sacred texts provide ample reflection for my personal conversion and institutional change.
I have said that the protection of our youth and providing the safest environment for our young people is the work of our lifetime. I know our efforts in the Diocese of Duluth have made a difference. As a diocese we will continue to offer prayers for healing and reparation. I ask the clergy, religious, and lay faithful to pray and fast so as to lead the Church to enact canonical changes that hold bishops accountable, protect men discerning a call to the priesthood, and lead to new mechanisms of holding bishops accountable that have never been in place before to safeguard our children and restore trust. 

I apologize and humbly ask your forgiveness for what I and my fellow bishops have done or failed to do. I am sorry for anyone who has been hurt and the scandal caused in the Body of Christ.  - Bishop Paul Sirba

Just a comment.

Agree or disagree with me, but I assure you bishops like Sirba, priests like Fr. Altier who have the courage to admit these problems publicly, are not in the least 'homophobic'.  Nor are they scapegoating gay priests or gay Catholics.  I know them.  They have heard my confessions.  They are among the best men I have ever had the grace and privilege to know.

I am absolutely convinced that part of this scandal is a direct attack by the evil one against the Church, especially as it has evolved now to this point, pitting the faithful against the hierarchy, condemning them as an entity.  Many of the younger bishops must be as shocked as we are about the senior bishops systematically covering up and enabling the evildoers to remain in ministry.

Thinking of Fatima, how Our Lord and Our Lady insisted that the consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was only effective if the Pope and the Bishops united to perform that work, it seems to me Heaven requires that same unity of the Pope and Bishops to confront this crisis.  Thus the Holy Father calls us to prayer and penance to obtain that grace.  It's an extremely serious appeal which we need to heed, and we need to support the Holy Father and the Bishop in union with him. 



*I am thinking of how Our Lord made a request in 1943 through Sr. Lucia to the Bishops of Spain:

I had to make known to the Archbishop of Valladolid, by order of His Excellency, a little request of Our Lord to the bishops of Spain and another to the bishops of Portugal. May God grant that all of them hear His voice!
He wishes that the bishops of Spain gather together in a retreat and determine a reform in the people, clergy and religious orders; for some convents! and many members of others…! do you understand?
He wishes that it be made clear to souls that the true penance He now wants and requires consists first of all in the sacrifice that each one must make to fulfill his own religious and temporal duties. - Sr. Lucia

NB:  Likewise, I think the false interpreters of Fatima by those who have promoted conspiracy theories that Sr. Lucia had a double and suggest this cardinal or bishop and even the pope, have disobeyed heaven and deny the 3rd secret was revealed, as well as insisting the consecration was not made, are proven to be false simply on the basis of their seeking to turn Catholics against the authentic Magisterium and the Pope.

26 August, 2018 Update:  Even after the bad news, I stand with the Church and the Holy Father.

An artist I like.

Stefano Di Stasio is an Italian visual artist who was born in 1948 in Naples, Italy.
He lives and works in Rome and Spoleto.
Di Stasio participated in the Quadriennale di Roma in 1986, 1992 and 2000.

He participated in the Biennale di Venezia, with his personal space, in 1984 and 1995.

Per più informazioni leggi qui: https://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2017/08/Stefano-Di-Stasio.html
© Tutt'Art@ | Pittura * Scultura * Poesia * Musica |

Can't stop it now ...

le déluge!

So much will be unraveling now ...

Don't be surprised.

Pray for the Holy Father and the bishops in communion with him.  I think this is part of the prayer and penance Our Lord requires right now.

The call to prayer and penance from the Holy Father is very serious and urgent.  We need great charity to respond.  Ask for it.

Virtue signalling, rash judgment and hypocrisy.

di Stasio

Oh -and tribalism.

I'm fairly uneducated when it comes to writing and media  In fact, I rarely read any one's books cover to cover when they send them to me to read and review.  So I miss a lot, I suppose, but maybe not.

I began to skim contemporary 'literature' when I began to read Fr. Groeschel's books which he batted out one after another, realizing that much of it was transcribed from his talks and homilies.  Nothing wrong with that, but it didn't inspire devotion or introduce anything I didn't know already.  So my reading library, though rather full, isn't comprised of contemporary writers  - especially anyone with a blog or website, because once again, their pamphlet-books end up being a sort of reprint of what they have said already.  When they announce they are writing an apologetic work on this or that doctrine, I know it's not for me.  

Pundits and apologists 'virtue signal'.

It's not a new term for me, but I never thought about it, or what it meant.  So when a guy on FB kept posting complaints and rants because this or that nemesis of his used terms he considered offensive or hateful - in other words, politically incorrect = he's call them out about it.  Amazing how much effort a Catholic apologist expends fighting unjust word usage in his opponents, all the while his followers go on the attack with more invective.  One seems worse than the other.  They make a career attacking those they disagree with, which is one more reason their books and articles have little to no credibility.

When they ban or unfriend you, that is fine with me, but I'm a bit bewildered.  You see they have a language, a sort of canon of their own.  You can't say this, or suggest that, and you can never, ever use this or that term.  They do exactly the same thing the opposition they condemn as too conservative, too rad-trad and too narrow, do.  Call me naive, but I don't know why these people have jobs, much less writing contracts.  Who even made them apologists?

Study and fags in British boarding school.

Fagging - what a strange word.

Homo-correct-us.

It's like saying ssa or gay.  For me, in general usage, they are synonymous.  Theologically-politically they are different, but as I love to say - even the pope uses the general term, gay.  So I don't make a big deal there.  I don't care.  It can be virtue signalling and extremely hypocritical, and I'll tell you why.  A priest acquaintance of mine took an interest in a guy who used to comment on my blog.  The man was involved in Courage and was discerning a vocation.  I told my priest about him and one of the first things he did was identify himself as ssa - 'I'm same sex attracted too."  Why would he do that?  I never ever asked him if he was, but he told the young man I was concerned about that he was.  I guess they corresponded for awhile.  What I am saying is that Fr. told the other guy he just met that he was gay too.  You can say ssa, but you are still letting the other person you are gay too.

I'm not going to belabor that point except to say that's a case of virtue signalling becoming hypocrisy.  It happens all of the time online.  It's fake.  It's rash judgment to condemn a person for saying gay when you use ssa to identify in the same way.  Yet they will accuse me of rash judgment for saying what I just said.

all are punish'd...

Both sides of the culture wars and their minions bark at one another.  It is much worse when they hide beneath the LGBTQ and SSA labels - battling over common language usage, feigning offense.  It kills me how the overly sensitive piss and moan over hurt feeling because someone uses the wrong term or suggests Catholic teaching is right.  Or on the other hand, boasting about their conservative politics against liberals but feeling attacked and oppressed when their gay-rights are not honored by the Church and they are not permitted to enter seminary.  

No one will admit that there is a problem of homosexual corruption in the Church because homosexuals think they are just fine and ssa people think they aren't gay.  And I laugh, because I over-simplify and use generalities, but y'all are either really misinformed, or you have lost touch with reality and are bound by tribalism.  Just saying.

Zeus and Ganymede

Hypocrites in a nut-cup ...

The problem of homosexual corruption originates in the hierarchy and corruption has a way of enabling all sorts of evils, including paedophilia, but the majority of cases involved homosexual advances-predation.  Every gay male my age knows that.  Younger gay males may think otherwise, unless of course they have encounters with, or are attracted to older men.  Contrary to what people like Sciambra and psychologists and others believe, it isn't always a father figure issue.  It can be complex, but when I was a boy, it was about 'seeing a grown man naked' and being accepted by a grown man as having some value.  I wasn't looking for a dad - I wanted to be with a mature man and recognized as a man.  But I'm not writing here to tell my story.

Everyone has their own opinion and some are insistent that you accept their narrative or else - you become persona non grata.  Especially if they have statistics and academic studies - no matter how far flung or biased.  They in turn are happy to calculate the same stats according to their bias.  One guy just suggested the paedophilia thing was more akin to soldiers in wartime raping POWs than anything even remotely related to homosexuality.  And he considers himself an apologist.  He is continually defending gays from being scapegoated by conservatives without ever having experienced first hand living in a homosexual milieu, and most likely never hit on by a homosexual predator.  And he will not listen to someone who has, who as an 18 year old moved in with his boss 20 years his senior.  I was dressed in designer suits and shown off at cocktail parties, bars, and trips to NYC and elsewhere.  Just like McCarrick and his buddies did with their boys.

It's fact of gay life and it still goes on, legal age or not.  Kevin Spacey is not a pedophile, he's just gay - oops!  SSA.  One must repeat, not all gays are like that, and it's more likely a predator like him is either closeted - like McCarrick and his ssa-gay clerics, or they are married to women and even have a child or two of their own.  In denying this, they perpetuated the corruption.  I want to repeat something I wrote in another post: There is a huge difference between a cleric, in a moment of weakness, going to a public park for anonymous sex, and a bishop having gay cocktail parties to show off his latest seminarian boy friend.  As Pope Francis said,  "A varnished putrefaction: this is the life of someone who is corrupt."

Corruption molests and abuses and destroys - it operates and thrives in secrecy.  I could be wrong of course.

Scene from Death in Venice

A metaphor for Fr. Martin's book ...

St. Bernard

If only those who are incapable of remaining continent would fear to profess perfection rashly and to assume the title of celibacy...it would without doubt have been better to marry than to burn (1 Cor 7:9), to be saved in the humble ranks of the faithful than to live less worthily in the lofty ranks of the clergy and be more severely judged...They abstain from from the remedy afforded by marriage and give themselves up to all forms of vice.  (On Conversion, a Sermon to Clerics, trans. Bernard Saïd, OSB)

LISTEN!

Obedire ...

It's about corruption:

“Where there is deceit, the Holy Spirit is not present,” Pope Francis said. “This is the difference between a sinner and a man who is corrupt. One who leads a double life is corrupt, whereas one who sins would like not to sin, but he is weak or he finds himself in a condition he cannot resolve, and so he goes to the Lord and asks to be forgiven. The Lord loves such a person, he accompanies him, he remains with him. And we have to say, all of us who are here: sinner yes, corrupt no”.

Those who are corrupt, Pope Francis continued, do not know what humility is. Jesus likens them to whitewashed tombs: they appear beautiful on the outside, but inside they are full of dead bones. “And a Christian who boasts of being a Christian but does not lead a Christian life is corrupt”. We all know such people, and we all know “how much harm corrupt Christians, and corrupt priests do to the Church. What harm they do to the Church! They do not live in the spirit of the Gospel, but in the spirit of worldliness. St Paul states it clearly to the Romans: Do not be conformed to this world (cf. Rom 12:2). However, it is even stronger in the original text: do not enter into this world’s schemes, into its framework, because this leads to a double life”. 

Pope Francis concluded: “A varnished putrefaction: this is the life of someone who is corrupt. And Jesus does not call them simply sinners. He calls them hypocrites. And yet Jesus always forgives, he never tires of forgiving. The only thing he asks is that there be no desire to lead this double life. Let us ask the Lord for the grace to flee from every form of deceit and to see ourselves as sinners. Sinners yes, corrupt no”. - Pope Francis

I posted this late last night because of some junk I read on Facebook.  People are making this into a political-ideological problem.  It's a moral issue as I've been writing about - it's corruption - the Holy Father has been very clear about this all along.  We will see how he handles it, agree or disagree.  People are nevertheless blinded by their political bias and PC preferences.  I actually thought this would be clear to so-called cultural warriors, but evidently not.  Politics as usual.

There is a huge difference between a cleric, in a moment of weakness, going to a public park for anonymous sex, and a bishop having gay cocktail parties to show off his latest seminarian boy friend.  "A varnished putrefaction: this is the life of someone who is corrupt."