Saturday, March 09, 2013

The Holy Spirit and fallible Conclave choices

An important post by Roberto de Mattei, "The Holy Ghost and the upcoming Conclave" (Rorate Caeli, March 8, 2013), who discerns the dimensions of the crisis. Excerpts:
Massimo Franco writes in the “Corriere della Sera” of February 27, 2013, that, “inside Vatican City a model of government and a conception of the Papacy is coming to an end” and he compares the difficulties that the Church is going through today to the final phase of the crisis in the Soviet Kremlin. “The decline of the Vatican Empire – he writes – accompanies that of the USA and the European Union [both] in economic and demographic crisis. It shows a model of Papacy and of centralized ecclesiastical government, challenged by a fragmented and decentralized reality.” The crisis of the Vatican Empire is presented as a crisis of a model of Papacy and of ecclesiastical government which is inadequate for the world in the 21st century....

In reality, that which is in crisis is not the “monocratic” government, which conforms to the Tradition of the Church, but the system of government born of the post-conciliar reforms, which in the last fifty years have expropriated the Papacy of its sovereign authority, redistributing the power among the Episcopal Conferences and an omnipotent Secretariat of State....

.... Was it the Holy Ghost Who prompted the election of Alexander VI, a Pope who conducted a profoundly immoral life before and after his election? No theologian, nor any Catholic for that matter, would be able to sustain that the 23 cardinals who elected the Borgia Pope were illuminated by the Holy Ghost. And if it did not happen in that election, you can envision that it did not happen in other elections and conclaves, which saw the election of weak Popes, unworthy and inadequate to their lofty mission, all this without prejudicing in any way the greatness of the Papacy.

The Church is great precisely because She endures the smallness of men. So, an immoral and inadequate Pope can be elected. It can happen that the Cardinals in Conclave refuse the influence of the Holy Ghost and that the Holy Ghost Who assists the Pope in the accomplishment of his mission, be refused. This does not mean that the Holy Ghost is defeated by men and the demon. God, and only God, is capable of drawing good from evil and thus Providence guides every event in history....

.... Each man, each nation, each ecclesiastical assembly, must correspond to Grace, which in order to be efficacious, needs human cooperation. Confronted with this auto-demolition of the Church, which Paul VI spoke of, we cannot remain with our arms folded in a state of pseudo-mystical optimism. We need to pray and act, each one according to their possibilities, so that this crisis is brought to an end and the Church may show visibly that holiness and beauty which She has never lost, and will never lose until the end of time.
Difficult as it may seem, each of us has the burden of bearing his part of the weight of the present challenge facing the Church, by means of prayer, fasting, and any other means at his disposal. One cannot sail on the Titanic and expect the Holy Spirit to save the ship from a collision course with an ice berg. The mystery is that God is sovereign and His purposes cannot be thwarted, yet particular outcomes still depend on our doing our part by conforming to His grace. Let us make a good Lent.

4 comments:

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Pope Apple Sauce we do not need (MOTTS). A Scola Papacy would be More Of The Terrestrial Same

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

In her Autobiography, Are you gonna eat them fries ? the Prophet, Totie Fields, said, Comes there a bright noon day when bats jet out of a South American cave and become fungos and start hitting coconuts over Tierra del fuego; and a year after that, a Japanese woman named, Midori, will be elected Pope; mark my words and pick-up the check please - I've got to drag my fat ass over to Dairy Queen before it closes.

Sheldon said...

IANS,

Now that we have Pope Francis, I'm wondering whether you think his papacy would be MOTS or maybe a purging of the lavender mafia and some things good.

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Sheldon. After hearing his name I did some checking around and what I discovered about him made me depressed.

Prior to the Conclave,I actualised the theological virtue of Hope in praying for and anticipating a Traditional Catholic Pope and I am disappointed that upon learning who it was who was elected I was unable to sound like about one-half of the men in Coventry who were heard cheering, "Hurray for our side," as Lady Godiva came riding into town.

The College of Cardinals (were they all once students at Faber before flunking-out?) had a chance to respond to the Graces of The Holy Ghost and elect as Pope a Catholic Traditionalist (redundant, really) that Holy Mother Church so desperately needs but the Cardinals (The lot of them chosen by our last two Popes) turned a deaf ear to The Holy Ghost and, having as their own agendas a total remake of The Catholic Faith, they chose Bergolio and revolution rather than a Traditional restorationist.

And as that does appear to be their agenda, what does that tell you about our last two Popes who chose the men who chose Bergolio?

After his inauspicious beginning, I expect catastrophe to come cascading down over we Traditionalists.

I expect Pope Francis to force the Traditional Orders to offer the Lil' Licit Liturgy and I expect he will studiously ignore S.P. if not officially revoking it in the name of unity.

I think his Papacy will be a major disaster and I expect he will smile and wave and refuse to do his duty to exercise discipline and manage the Church.

With his repeated use of "Bishop" to refer to his own self he has signaled he considers his own self Primus inter pares and the schismatics of the east and the media already love him for they sense he will not reign or rule as Supreme Pontiff.

I expect that the effete ecumenism that has ruint Holy Mother Church in all of her aspects - from Mass to Doctrine to perverse Praxis - will intensify under Pope Francis.

And I think all of these things are just punishments from God for our sins and I think it will get so bad that even the Brick By Brick Bund will begin courting despair.

I hope that what I have written doesn't come across as negative...