Father Rutler: Cardinal Stepinac

Father George W. Rutler

In March of 1937, Pope Pius XI issued two encyclicals within five days of each other. Mit Brennender Sorge condemned National Socialism, and Divini Redemptoris condemned Communism. These ideologies, attacking human dignity and replacing God with the power of the self-justifying State, were two sides of the same coin. That is a figure of speech. It is not a figure of speech to say that Christ was crucified between two thieves. Throughout their harsh history, the Slavic countries have known what it is like to be so crucified. The power of Saint John Paul II was burnished by his youthful experience of suffering in Poland under the Nazis, only then to endure Marxism. So too were the travails of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary and Cardinal Stepinac in Croatia.
 

My Lenten reading has included a biography of Aloyius Stepinac, who became archbishop of Zagreb six months after those papal encyclicals were published. He had been consecrated a bishop in 1934, just four months before his King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, on a state visit to France, was assassinated in Marseilles along with the French foreign minister. Alexander was a king kind and good, and such men are not invariably treated kindly and well. The diplomatic hopes for the unity of the Croatian and Serbian peoples began to unravel. The study of Balkan history is not for the weak of heart. Nor is the study of the Croatian language. One begins with the complicated accent marks for pronunciation, and things get worse from there.
 

Cardinal Stepinac now has a fine high school in our archdiocese named for him, albeit not pronounced “Stepinatz” as he did. His sufferings for five years after World War II in the frightening Communist prison of Lepoglava got the attention of the world. During that Cold War period, conflicting sides either championed him or vilified him, depending on their political inclinations. Some tried to protect the reputation of his persecutor Marshal Tito, just as the journalist Walter Duranty had protected Stalin in his accounts of Soviet forced famine and show trials on the pages of The New York Times.
 

Saint John Paul II knew the complicated loyalties and demands of those difficult years. No one, and certainly no nation, is angelic, but in 1998 at the shrine of Marija Bistrica, before half a million people, Pope John Paul II beatified Aloysius Stepinac as a martyr.
 

Stepinac had accepted the cardinalatial hat knowing that its red means blood, and is not just an excuse for a party as it sometimes is regarded in decadent times. Some pedants with a political bias complained that the tortured Stepinac did not smile much. But by papal decree, Holy Mother Church is now smiled upon by that successor of the holy Apostles. Walking along the road to Jerusalem these days of Lent, the faithful invoke the saints to cheer them along the way, and among them is Aloysius Stepinac.

Philip Lawler with Raymond Arroyo on the Bergoglio Apostasy

PHILIP F. LAWLER, editor of Catholic World News and author of the new book "Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock".

Pope Francis: The Degenerate neo-Pelagian Pontiff Exalting Himself

From Call the Patriot
By Joseph Andrew Settanni

But, is it really worth the price of the ecclesiastical civil war called schism?

Admittedly, it is difficult trying to properly grasp the full nature of a pop culture figure who happens to be a widely known religious leader of many hundreds of millions of people, the presumed believers. Popularity, as a result, can often so obscure the true image of such a public figure, a dramatic character, who looms rather large upon the world stage.

As is known (or should be), Francis, an egoist, is the first pope of his kind by being a Jesuit pope and coming from Latin America, from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first non-European Vicar of Christ since the days of that Syrian Pope Gregory III who had reigned from 731 to 741 AD.   His unique nature inordinately bolsters his expansive pride of self and disproportionate sense of historical importance, besides, e. g., existential or phenomenological considerations as to the Papacy itself.

Necessarily, misjudgments are, on average, not just simply possible but fairly predictable as a direct consequence of not fully appreciating and seriously analyzing the weighty reality of the person being confronted, intellectually and otherwise. The indicative matter to be most clearly and significantly focused upon concerns what appears to be a totally neglected issue, namely, the great horror of degeneracy, both theological and religious being here entirely inclusive.  How is this critically meant?

A Frightening Sight to Behold: Medusa

Most (deficient) analyses of the current Vicar of Christ either wish to charge him with some degrees of Communist influence or, alternately, deny fundamentally such influence. Both miss the deeper reality, the true moral ugliness, involved.  The man is a confirmed heretic, not just a neo-Marxist.  The best way, thus, to intellectually and honestly approach Francis is to understand that his central religious view is a neo-Pelagian one, and it has had negative consequences; this is meaning as to the ultimate heresy he so prefers, while it is true, in addition, that he has congenially embraced other heresies as well no doubt.

In brief, the original heresy goes back to its basis in Pelagianism; in essence, it is the haughty denial of the pernicious results of the existence of Original Sin, though other features were, of course, attendant to the theologically radical, heterodox, thinking of the heretic priest Pelagius (354 – 420 AD).   This British troublemaker, also called a moralist, had made a name for himself in Rome with his God-defiant thinking seen in his so terribly perverse soteriological speculations, especially that Jesus Christ was not really important concerning salvation.

He openly rejected the Augustinian idea of predestination and, instead, declared adamantly in favor of an absolutist version of the doctrine of free will.  People, he preached, can simply attain their salvation by, in effect, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, the exaltation of the self. Pelagius had totally denied the need for the requirement of divine aid, meaning grace, in the performance of any good works.

Human nature was not, therefore, ever corrupted by Original Sin and, thus, people could, by their mere will, fulfill the entire law of moral conduct and attain spiritual perfection, moreover, without any need for divine grace whatsoever. Metaphysical order, for Pelagius, was made basically superfluous as to the possibilities of Man, when the orthodox theocentric viewpoint is rejected in favor of a seemingly vibrant anthropocentricism.

Jerusalem's Church of Holy Sepulchre Shuts Indefinitely Amid Fierce Row with Israel

Jerusalem's famous Church of the Holy Sepulchre has shut indefinitely in an unprecedented move amid a fierce row with the Israeli government.

The church is the holiest site in Christianity and is held to contain the two sites where Jesus was crucified then buried and resurrected.

It is highly unusual for the Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic denominations, who all share custody of the church, to agree to a stance as dramatic as closing the whole site and tensions between denominations often run high over control of its various chapels and compartments.

But the separate leaders issued a joint statement saying the move was 'in protest at persistent moves to intimidate Christians and discriminate against churches in the Holy Land'.

Worshippers hold candles as they take part in the Christian Orthodox Holy Fire ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The shock move comes amid a tense fallout with the Israeli government over a bill that would give the Israeli government power to confiscate church property. The 'Bill of Church Lands', sponsored by Israeli settler groups and signed by 40 members of Israel's Knesset, was branded 'discriminatory and racist' as well as 'abhorrent' in the strongly worded statement signed by Theophilos III, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Francesco Patton, Custos of the Holy Land and Nourhan Manougian, Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem.

It amounts to a 'systematic campaign against the Churches and the Christian community in the Holy Land', the church leaders said in a statement on Sunday.

Read more at Christianity Today >> 

Westminster Cathedral Choir - "Ave Verum Corpus" - W. A. Mozart

Father Rutler: Beautiful, Inconsistent Switzerland

Father George W. Rutler

Few lands are more cheerful than beautiful Switzerland. There are the mountains, the blonde girls yodeling, the lads sounding Alpine horns across the canyons, St. Bernard dogs with brandy, and all that chocolate and material prosperity. The cynic would dismiss that as a caricature. Think of Orson Welles in the 1949 film The Third Man: “. . . in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
 

The cuckoo clock was actually invented in the Black Forest of Germany. And while thoughts of Switzerland evoke peace, its last strife being a brief civil war in 1847, it is highly militarized and was famous for its mercenaries (which is how the Holy See got the Swiss Guards), and it has mandatory conscription for all able-bodied males. With the lowest crime rate in the world, it ranks only below the United States and Yemen in per capita gun ownership. Switzerland is the second largest exporter per capita of assault weapons, ammunition and tanks to such countries as Saudi Arabia. No country has an unblemished history, and in 2013 the government formally apologized for the forced labor of half a million children in the past two centuries. Officially neutral in World War II, it profited greatly as a banker for Nazi gold.
 

While proud of its reputation for enlightened social policies, abortion is legal there and the first-trimester limit can be extended for “medical and psychological reasons.” In our time of mania for tearing down politically incorrect statues, there remains in the heart of Bern the 1546 Kindlifresser statue of an ogre devouring babies.
 

If the monstrous man were eating lobsters, the statue might be torn down because the Swiss government has passed a law effective March 1 that bans the boiling alive of lobsters, since it is claimed that lobsters can feel pain. Lobsters may only be cooked after first having been electrocuted or sedated. This will not have much impact, since Switzerland is land-locked, with negligible crustacean consumption; but imported lobsters must be shipped in seawater and not packed in ice. This runs parallel to California’s legislation banning foie gras, which requires the forced feeding of geese. But partial-birth abortion remains legal, even though human life in utero can feel pain after at least the first eight weeks of gestation.
 

We can eat lobsters even in Lent, by a revelation given to St. Peter (Acts 10:13-15). But the same God knew (Jeremiah 1:4-5) that unborn babies are sensate. That notwithstanding, there are places where lobsters and geese are safer than human babies. Inconsistent? As Sir Walter Scott wrote: “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!” 

A Youthful and Ancient Spark of Faith in Europe

I have always found the idea of a real walking spiritual pilgrimage very appealing and am determined to join one of these while I am still able.  In the above video, Canon Montjean discusses the upcoming 2018 Chartres Pilgrimage interspersed with clips from EWTN's documentary of the 2013 pilgrimage "In Search of Christendom - The Chartres Pilgrimage." This year Canon Montjean is leading groups from the Institute of Christ The King's churches at New Brighton, Preston and in Ireland. Should anyone wish to join them on 2018 Chartres Pilgrimage, please contact Canon at newbrighton@icrsp.org.

 

For those who can't make the trek to Chartres, the concept of a walking spiritual pilgrimage has always been a vibrant part of Polish Catholic culture.  Polish-Americans undertake a grand pilgrimage here in the United States each year from Great Meadows, New Jersey to the American Czestochowa, Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  The next one is scheduled for August 9-12, 2018, with more information here.