Tag Archives: Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI’s Legacy: Faith and Future

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Catholic World Report just posted an article by me on the legacy of Pope Benedict:

The new springtime for the Church hoped for by Blessed John Paul II has found its great advocate and defender in Benedict XVI.  He has been an indefatigable defender of Tradition and renewal in the light of both the Second Vatican Council and the crisis that has been its aftermath.  Perhaps one may call him a transitional pope.  However, work that he has done will prove pivotal to future of the Church willed by Christ.  Joseph Ratzinger was the guardian of the doctrine of the faith under Blessed John Paul II, and his resignation has given us the extraordinary conclave that elected Pope Francis.  But what he did in this transition was to make clear once again to the naysayers that, even in crisis, the Church is the only viable future, just as it was at the beginning when it was small and persecuted.

Continue reading at Catholic World Report

 

Facing East

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Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter

Taming the Holy Spirit?

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Pope Francis is in continuity with Pope Benedict on the matter of having the Church press forward in the light of Vatican II.  First, Pope Benedict draws a direct correlation between the “traditional innovations” of the Franciscan Order which were misinterpreted by heretical Franciscans and defended properly by St. Bonaventure, and the difficulties of postconcilar implementation:

At this point it might be useful to say that today too there are views that see the entire history of the Church in the second millennium as a gradual decline. Some see this decline as having already begun immediately after the New Testament. In fact, “Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt”:  Christ’s works do not go backwards but forwards. What would the Church be without the new spirituality of the Cistercians, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, the spirituality of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross and so forth? This affirmation applies today too: “Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt”, they move forward. St Bonaventure teaches us the need for overall, even strict discernment, sober realism and openness to the newness, which Christ gives his Church through the Holy Spirit. And while this idea of decline is repeated, another idea, this “spiritualistic utopianism” is also reiterated. Indeed, we know that after the Second Vatican Council some were convinced that everything was new, that there was a different Church, that the pre-Conciliar Church was finished and that we had another, totally “other” Church an anarchic utopianism! And thanks be to God the wise helmsmen of the Barque of St Peter, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, on the one hand defended the newness of the Council, and on the other, defended the oneness and continuity of the Church, which is always a Church of sinners and always a place of grace.

Today Pope Francis has reiterated the necessity to go forward, emphasizing that the Holy Spirit is not subject to anyone’s presuppositions.  This is the Holy Father speaking.  It is his business to discern these matters:

Put frankly, the Pope continued, “the Holy Spirit upsets us because it moves us, it makes us walk, it pushes the Church forward.” He said that we wish “to calm down the Holy Spirit, we want to tame it and this is wrong.” Pope Francis said “that’s because the Holy Spirit is the strength of God, it’s what gives us the strength to go forward” but many find this upsetting and prefer the comfort of the familiar.
Nowadays, he went on, “everybody seems happy about the presence of the Holy Spirit but it’s not really the case and there is still that temptation to resist it.” The Pope said one example of this resistance was the Second Vatican council which he called “a beautiful work of the Holy Spirit.” But 50 years later, “have we done everything the Holy Spirit was asking us to do during the Council,” he asked. The answer is “No,” said Pope Francis. “We celebrate this anniversary, we put up a monument but we don’t want it to upset us. We don’t want to change and what’s more there are those who wish to turn the clock back.” This, he went on, “is called stubbornness and wanting to tame the Holy Spirit.”

The Pope said the same thing happens in our personal life. “The Spirit pushes us to take a more evangelical path but we resist this.” He concluded his homily by urging those present not to resist the pull of the Holy Spirit. “Submit to the Holy Spirit,” he said, “which comes from within us and makes go forward along the path of holiness.”

Pope Benedict and Pope Francis are in complete continuity here, Benedict emphasizing the balance, avoiding the extremes of an attitude of “the Church is in decline” and “spiritualistic utopianism,” and Francis emphasizing the fact that the Holy Spirit cannot be harnessed or stopped by anyone on the pretext of knowing better than the Church.

I think it is also important to point out that the Holy Father is not vitiating the the dispositions of Pope Benedict in respect to the use of the Extraordinary Form of the Liturgy, as long as it is perceived in relationship with the Ordinary Form as “mutual enrichment,” and in respect to the legitimacy and intended fruitfulness of the Council and its reforms.  In any case, the idea of “turning back the clock” did not come from Pope Benedict.

Awsome homily from Pope Francis!

Updated: Antisemitism Cloaked in Lace and Brocade

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Rorate Caeli is engaging in one huge piece of hypocrisy with its post entitled: “Our supreme priority is love.”  Dawn Eden has taken RC’s reporting to task because of its use of the opinions of an antisemitic blogger, and now RC accuses her of being an uncharitable ideologue.

RC is a clearing house for every spiteful opinion on the postconciliar Church, and no one is exempt as a target, including Pope Benedict, who now RC claims as their great ideal—the man who reached out the SSPX in charity and has been despised by the progressives for doing so. Now RC claims to share in the Pope Emeritius’ persecution because like him, RC is a the promoter of pastoral charity towards those most marginalized.  Like Pope Benedict, RC wants “to educate with love.”

What?

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The Franciscan Papacy: Rebuilding or Demolition?

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The life of St. Francis is subject to much sentimental hype because of his love for creation and his identification with the poor.  The saccharine images on holy cards and sculptures in gardens don’t help the matter.  And Zeffirelli’s hippie-revolutionary film version of the saint is positively infuriating.  Pope Francis seems be subject to the same kind of misinterpretaion.

The media and the Catholic propagandists on the left and the right will continue to mythologize about St. Francis and Pope Francis’ selection of the name.  The pope himself has said the reason for the choice of name has to do with “peace” and “poverty.”  Oh, those two words: two little threads out of which the propagandists will weave a rope to hang us all with.  Sandro Magister puts it well:

In the pseudo-Franciscan and pauperist mythology that in these days so many are applying to the new pope, imagination runs to a Church that would renounce power, structures, and wealth and make itself purely spiritual.

But it is not for this that the saint of Assisi lived. In the dream of Pope Innocent III painted by Giotto, Francis is not  demolishing the Church, but carrying it on his shoulders. And it is the Church of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the bishop of Rome, at that time recently restored and decorated lavishly, but made ugly by the sins of its men, who had to be purified. It was a few followers of Francis who fell into spiritualism and heresy. Continue reading →

Pope Francis the Liturgist

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Plenty eyebrows have been raised and heads scratched because Pope Francis washed the feet of two girls one of whom was a Muslim at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper last night. This was announced before hand, so news of it has been circulating for several days.

One reader and commenter has directed my attention to an article in First Things by John Shimek in which the author expresses his conviction that the Holy Father acted within the jurisdiction of his office because “by virtue of his office he possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely” (c. 331).  Ed Peters, on the other hand, a well respected canonist, believes that in the face of general disregard for canon and liturgical law, which has been prevalent throughout the Church for many years, the Holy Father is offering a poor example.  Peters believes this, even though in the past he has expressed his opinion that there is no particular reason why the law restricting the washing of the feet to men could not be changed. Continue reading →

Francis Against the Dictatorship of Relativism

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Pope Francis has spoken again of his reason for taking the name of the Saint of Assisi: poverty and peace.  In his address to the diplomatic corps this morning, he drew a link between a certain kind of poverty and a lack of peace.  Taking up the sword of Benedict XVI, he railed against he dictatorship of relativism by which individuals make themselves the measure of all things and thus subordinate the good of others to their own whims:

But there is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the “tyranny of relativism”, which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples. And that brings me to a second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

In this Pope Francis shows his particular bent of mind as a protector of the poor, but in so doing he shows himself the true successor of Pope Benedict.  The safeguarding of the dogmatic truth of the Church, the deposit of faith, must engage an orthopraxy that extends itself especially to the protection of the weakest and most in need.

This is precisely the kind of evangelization that is bound to propagate the faith in the world we live in today.

Pray for the ministry of Pope Francis.

The Holy Grail of Pope Francis: Our Lady of Lujan and Undoer of Knots

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An Argentinian silversmith, Juan Carlos Pallarols, is handcrafting a simple silver chalice for Pope Francis, which will be embossed with two images of the Blessed Mother:  Our Lady of Lujan, an Argentinian image of the Immaculate Conception, associated with a 17th century miracle, and Our Lady Undoer of Knots, a German devotion which Cardinal Bergoglio brought to Argentina in the 1980′s and has since promoted there.  The same silversmith collaborated with Cardinal Bergoglio in designing another chalice, embossed with the image of Our Lady Undoer of Knots, which the Cardinal presented to Pope Benedict shortly after he ascended to the Chair of St. Peter.

It is quite interesting that that this Argentinian pope should have a personal attraction to the German devotion.  It provides a kind of link between the two successors of St. Peter, of which there are others. Continue reading →

Francis and the Holy Spirit

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The people of St. Francis’ time, both the hierarchy and the simple faithful, recognized him as a particular prophetic instrument of the Holy Spirit.  He created a movement that set the world on fire and it spread like fire.  His movement was both traditional and innovative.  I wonder if in the providence of God Pope Francis’ name has a significance beyond what even himself might have anticipated.  St. Francis was an instrument of the Holy Spirit to reform the Church in difficult times.  But his innovation was not without its own problems. Reform typically initiates a crisis from which equilibrium only emerges after time and much difficulty.

St. Francis’ spirit of obedience to the Church manifested itself, not only in an evangelical desire for reform and the simple gospel life.  It also showed itself in a docility to the prescriptions of reform promulgated by the Fourth Lateran Council.  In fact, St. Francis made sure that the simple gospel life of the friars was protected from pride and error by his instance, stated at both the beginning and end of his Rule, that the friars remain humble and submissive to the Holy Roman Pontiff. Continue reading →