...there is an "anti-Church" within the Church arguing against Orthodoxy and undermining all that might be done. Before anything else there must be a purification, a clear proclamation of Catholic Truth. Heresy is an attack on Truth... Heresy and heretics are the enemies of Christ and we really must pray for the Grace to recognise them for what they are and to learn to hate them for the terrible damage they do to the Church's ability to make Christ knowable. They are our enemy and the enemies of the Church... heresy tends to make truth obscure to the point where good becomes evil and evil becomes good.
Fr. Simon Henry:
PART 1
I. Those comments are apropos lead-ins for the subject matter treated herein, a kind of addendum to Ominous Signs. Another post late after the fact - which will come in three parts, yet the "Vatican II: For the Next Generation" conference held last year at St. Paul University is worthy of a post hoc assessment of involved participants and elaboration on critical points, for three reasons. Firstly, because of a cosmic teleconnection. The 2012 CCCB Plenary took place from September 24 to 28 and the SPU conference from September 27 to 29. There was date and location overlap, a convergence in the apostatic/heretical space-time continuum, so to speak. Where the personages and productions of the CCCB are embodiments of the Modernist hijacking of Vatican II Council, attendees at the SPU conference are its marketers and salesmen. SPU is in Ottawa, located just 131.1 kilometres west-southwest of Hotel Mont-Gabriel in Sainte-Adèle, Québec, according to Google Earth. So, for those conference participants at the CCCB plenary - like salesman/jetsetter Fr. Gilles "I love Armani suits" Routhier, it was just a matter of a short limousine drive up to the airport at fashionable Mont-Tremblant. Check-in, luggage drop-off, redeem those Air Miles, slug down a chocolate martini in the lounge, then board a Porter Airlines' Bombardier Q400, business class, wink to the sexy stewardess, honey roasted almonds snack-pack, fasten your seat belts, METARs read clear and sunny skies on the horizon, activate transponder, go for ignition, runway clear for take-off - and we're rockin' and rollin'. Short flight over the St. Lawrence to Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport. Touchdown on Runway 25. "On time". Yeah, baby, yeah!
II. Secondly, the conference provided a perfectly composed snapshot of the careerist/intelligentsia from assorted sectors inside the establishment church, of how they are working to undermine the Church in Canada from within, and recreating it in their own perverted image. Accordingly, an assessment of their views with a just few volley's will allow for a sizeable flock of Dodo birds to be exposed for the damage they do. These are the people that interact with, and are approved by, the Canadian bishops, consulting, advising, confidants. These are the people the bishops read and to whom they lend their ears. These are the ladder climbers, the celebrity seekers, the aggrandizers, the Professional Catholics, the people who always seem to almost magically obtain key positions in the religious bureaucracy, who get the write-ups in diocesan newspapers, who get the interviews on Salt+Light TV, who win the "awards" and get to hobnob with the right people. These are the enemies of the Church to whom Fr. Blake and Fr. Henry make reference. The SPU conference was a Canadian example of this "anti-Church" in action, actualized, asserting itself for everyone to behold so as to admire and to wonder a great wonder.
III. Thirdly, it was the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, so glitz, glitter and glamour at a gala were necessitous, to formally justify the Modernist-actuated catastrophe we see all around us today, which cries out for criticism. The Canadian stars of the Nu-Church came out, gathered at a Pontifical University now undeniably gone heretical, its loyalty to the Pontificate spent long ago, to celebrate five decades since the Council, to proclaim and hail it as the ultimate triumph of the Church since when the Lord of History was impaled at the intersection of two wooden beams. Not as if these Magic Circle luvvies actually ever contemplate the utter brutality of the Crucifixion, as will be evidenced later. Really, if you mine into the psychological subsurface, if you go way down deep... deep, you will discover the SPU confab to be Swan Song disguised as a Victory Cheer. Conference subtitle: "Reflecting on the importance of the council's teaching for the Church of the 21st century". How majestic, how spectacular, how far-reaching and life-altering. Again, there's that false, anticipatory sense of being on the verge of a new era in global affairs, a "new order of human relations", as the CCCB president voiced a few days earlier at the plenary. The worldwide ennui is about to cease and humanity will imminently be reinvigorated. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades...
IV. In reality, however, time is running out. Orthodoxy/traditionalism is re-emerging, accelerating since 2005 with Pope Benedict. The Age of Aquarius has run its course. That mesmerizing, magnetic, hope-inducing, soul-energizing, purple and orange psychedelic sky seen down range along the horizon - now that we've come in closer proximity to it after a 50-year ride on a party bus with the booze and broads flowing aplenty - has shockingly turned out to be but a mirage. And the aged adolescents who refused to grow up are now aghast in their realization that post-Vatican II playtime is over. Identities are being challenged. Whole careers invested in cornball liturgy, "social justice", ecumenical indifferentism, liberation theology, transcendental meditation, proportionalism, ecofeminism, gender neutrality, homosexuality - these, and more, have proven naught. A reversal is occurring, that which was once theirs is being retaken by an outside force. The desperation, and they're still reluctant to jump from the ship which goes by the name S.S. Minnow. Destination: Gilligan's Island. Everything is imploding around them. You can smell it.
V. Yet if you read the official take on what happened at the conference, of its luminaries and their interpretations of Vatican II, you'd think everything is proceeding as planned. All is well, ye Catholic peoples. Expectedly, an egregious report came from the Associate Editor at the Catholic Register, purportedly "Canada's Catholic News Source". Mr. Swan quoted five persons in his piece, the number skewed to the Left/Modernist end, with the customary pot shots against orthodox Catholicism. Two conference participants, namely Catherine Clifford (SPU professor) and Council peritus Gregory Baum (conveniently omitting he's an excommunicated ex-priest, as Fr. Rosica did in a recent interview with him), including Janet Somerville (associate editor of the now defunct Marxist/radicalist New Catholic Times, Canadian Council of Churches bureaucrat[1]), plus suit and tie Jesuit historian Fr. John O'Malley. After hearing Barry Obama's infamous commencement speech at the University Notre Dame in 2009, O'Malley got so excited he wet his pants, afterward fawning that Obama "embodied and professed in his public persona the spirit of the council".[2] No, that wasn't a quote from Tiger Beat magazine. Of these four favourites, a total of 294 words were quoted, according to my count, and to the token "conservative" (how quaint), namely Fr. Alphonse de Valk (not a conference attendee), only 80 words. And that's the thing about CR's Associate Editor - he evidently thinks everyone is unaware of his unbalanced write-ups, believing his reporting to be fair-minded and neutral, by stating in his article, for example, that the purpose of Vatican II:
You read this ostensible exercise in disassociation, a reporter supposedly rising above it all, being "objective", allegedly impartial. But then you come across mocking stunts like this, where Mr. Swan lets slip his derision for traditional-minded Catholics and, by implication, a hatred for resourcement. Let's not pretend anymore: the Associate Editor at the Catholic Register has demonstrated himself to be an adversary of anyone or any group with any shade of Orthodoxy, for years reflected in his reporting. The blatant bias, the selectivity of topics skewed Left, the parsing out, if not eschewing of, notable persons/positions which would otherwise bring wider contexts to a subject, the nonchalant citations of dissenters as reliable sources and escaping responsibility for doing so by a plausible deniability always afforded to an editor, the innuendos in his multiple articles plastered throughout each CR issue. It sure is fantastic to make a living from pewsitter donations while dishing out this baloney, and he has only been able to do so for such a long time because his diocesan overlords approve or deem nothing adverse involved, which says much.
VI. With the likes of CR's Associate Editor, then, a colossal effort is continuously, vigorously made to conceal the incontestable evidence that a wild, undisciplined, out-of-control aggiornamento has, since 1965, dominated, engulfed, eclipsed the so-called resourcement. Not the inverse and between the two "impulses" never has there been an equilibrium. This is the dirty little secret of the Modernists, of the SPU conference participants. Until recently with the internet emergence, the mainstream CanCatholic media successfully diverted eyes away from this actuality by bombarding us with editorials and accounts on the beauties and beneficences of the "spirit" of Vatican II, and anyone who disagreed was shooed away as some kind of antediluvian crackpot. For instance, here is Baum quoted in the aforementioned CR report:
Conceit and contempt just bleed from that statement. Those who point to the past and Tradition live by the "old time religion", they're out of date, unhip, scared little children. Even akin to Protestant fundamentalists, rigid, irrational, plastic, phoney, cold, cruel, unfeeling, unimaginative, uncreative, as if there was no doctrinal development in the 19+ centuries prior to the watershed year 1962. That's what Greg is communicating to the reader, a particular message of which Mr. Swan made sure to incorporate into his lovely synopsis. Just stick it to 'em. Drill it home, boys.
VII. Fortunately, in the last few years we've had fair, balanced and objective reporting from Deborah Gyapong, who is a godsend as far as I'm concerned. Especially after National Catholic Reporter dude Art Babych was at CCN. Three months before the SPU conference Gyapong provided it coverage, plus giving mention to an online petition started by John Pacheco at SoCon or Bust. It was directed to Abp. Pedro López Quintana, Canada's Apostolic Nuncio, summarizing dissenting views of the more prominent conference participants, requesting it to be sent to one keynote speaker, Peter Cardinal Turkson, asking him "to decline his invitation" thereat. The petition received a total of 582 signatures. Pretty impressive, but to no effect. +Quintana, ordained a priest and appointed bishop by John Paul II, entered the Holy See's diplomatic service in 1984. He served the nunciatures at Madagascar and Philippines, was advisor for the General Affairs of the Secretariat of State to the Apostolic Nuncio office, and is past nuncio for India and Nepal.[6] Accordingly, his reaction to the petition would have been just that: diplomatic, subdued, pleasantries, careful language, no waves. You get a sampling of these in +Quintana's innocuous interview in 2010 with the ever meddlesome and ubiquitous CEO of Salt+Light TV. The latter (drum roll) making sure to mention on-air his awe-inspiring role at World Youth Day 2002, thrice for greater impact. Anyway, when the petition got going in April 2012, +Quintana was probably already scheduled to deliver - and eventually did deliver - an address at the CCCB Plenary later in September,[7] coinciding and closely connected with the SPU conference challenged by the petition. Canon law does stipulate a legate "to send information to the Apostolic See... everything that touches the life of the Church and the good of souls" (no. 364/1). Plausibly, an e-mail was shot off to some intern working in a Dicastery basement. Though it's more likely +Quintana didn't even pass along the information, considering the silence. "Chiquita, file this under Miscellaneous for me. Gracias". Which goes to show that these days a better strategy is to bypass the nunciature altogether. Just cc your complaint letter to the MacNab Manor House as a formality then go direct to Rome. But, then, there is the Vatican bureaucracy with which to contend, let alone the numerous wolf packs stalking throughout the loggias, as Pope Benedict's abdication announcement made obvious.
VIII. KEYNOTE ADDRESS SPEAKERS: The SPU conference had three of them, none Canadian. First, ++Turkson, a Ghanaian prelate and president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, gave an address entitled "Vatican II: A Council of Justice and Peace". Helped by his good looks, amicable character and origin from an exotic land, ++Turkson has that special ability to charm the pants off even heterodox Catholics, as evidenced in an interview with an adoring Bobby Mickens at The Tablet.[8] He likes the press and the press likes him, which is a bad sign. Papabile rumours have floated about ++Turkson since at least 2010.[9] And, soonafter Pope Benedict's stunning announcement, he was letting the international media know that if we "have an African pope, that would be a great recognition of a church that has come of age and a church that is able to contribute to the universal church".[10] A big time no no. Translation: ++Turkson will not be our next pope, if I may make a prediction. Too publicly self-assertive and it appears His Eminence's celebrity has gotten to his head. Unless the canvassing is premeditated to attract criticism, thereby making his authenticity questionable amongst cardinal-electors, hence minimizing election chances. In actuality, the secular media's excitement about him becoming pope is due not so much to ++Turkson's African cultural heritage, and the distinct mode/approach that it might bring to the papacy. Rather, it's his skin colour. A sort of inverse racial profiling by Whitey the Liberal who has that irrepressible desire to showcase his moral superiority and thus feel really, really good about himself. Like those people who put "COEXIST" bumper stickers on their Prius'.
IX. Not to suggest ++Turkson is part of this "anti-Church", nor that he is somehow out of step with the Magisterium. His view against the secular West's racist-inspired population control agenda via abortion in the Third World is on the mark. Additionally, it has been wonderful to see the press go into hysterics after he recently said (correctly) that the Church's priest sex abuse scandal is mainly resultant of homosexual pederasts,[11] which goes to the whole Lavender Mafia network, its sickening entrenchment within Church structures now emerging into public light, thankfully. However, his wishy washy perspective on condoms does gives pause.[12] Nonetheless, ++Turkson was the delegate from Rome, meaning that, as a conference participant, he was the outsider to be tolerated with smiles, sunshine and lollipops. SPU was even gracious enough to confer him an honorary doctorate, which you can see Ottawa's Abp. Prendergast doing here. That +Prendergast is disallowing John Pacheco at SoCon or Bust from organizing a conference in Ottawa - an initiative with a prominent keynote speaker to countervail the SPU/V2 conference, pretty well verifies that, when it comes down to the uncomfortable crunch, +Prendergast is a poser and that all his tough talk (e.g. pro-abort politicians must not receive Communion) is just that: talk. Another good, loyal Catholic layman given the shaft. Another dead end bishop. He's a Jesuit, published by Novalis, so I guess it should have been expected, and we certainly hope +Terry has fun at the next "Theology on Tap". We also observe in the photographs the heresy-pimping Publishing Director at Novalis, which sponsored the SPU/V2 extravaganza, courtesy of Canadian tax dollars. Getting back, had ++Turkson been a CDF rep, instead of a "justice and peace" darling, you can bet Bill Shatner's toupee that the welcome wagon would have performed a U-turn. There is also the question of whether or not anyone in-the-know on the other side of the Atlantic properly advised ++Turkson on all the incestuous Magic Circle intrigue going on betwixt and between St. Paul's, Novalis, OMI and the Canadian bishops. My guesstimate is that Rome is largely oblivious and/or has higher priorities, which explains why St. Paul's undeservingly still retains its status as a Pontifical University. It is also noteworthy that, unlike the other two keynote speakers - giving their addresses in the SPU auditorium (capacity 300), ++Turkson the outsider was relegated to the less capacious university chapel for his talk. A chapel with cafeteria chairs instead of pews, minus kneelers. Groovy.
X. Next up we have another suit and tie Jesuit, a German, by the name of Christophe Theóbald. He's Professor of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology at the Centre Sèvres in Paris. His keynote address went by the title "Vatican II: A Vision for the Future, a Pedagogy of Faith, a Way to Resolve Particular Questions". Purpose: to "illustrate how the corpus of the Council's teaching present new avenues of transmission enabling present and future generations to envision the future of the Church". Excepting technical journals, Theóbald is cited infrequently in popular North American theological conversation (although, his Transmettre un évangile de liberté is distributed by Novalis via Bayard France, and former Timmins Bishop Paul Marchand had a liking in that Theóbald was referenced in a Pastoral Letter [14]). In the context of the SPU conference, however, Theóbald's take on Vatican II necessitates highlighting. This is because he is a disciple of the notorious "Bologna School", founded by the late historian/theologian Giuseppe Alberigo. In terms of influential accomplishments, between 1995 and 2001, Alberigo, along with colleague Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti, were responsible for History of Vatican II. A grand, multi-tome article compilation project (translated into seven languages) covering every aspect and detail of the Council wherein Theóbald,[13] including aforementioned Jetsetter Gilles, contributed articles. Theóbald and company deem the Second Vatican Council as a significant, tantamount irreconcilable, break from ecclesiastical tradition. A taste of Theóbald in action:
Here we see the customary, quasi-utopian "dawn of a new age" formula being invoked for V2, after downgrading the previous twenty councils (running a course from AD 325 to 1870, i.e. 1545 years) to a non sequitur. Sure, there is change, things form anew. Yet the sense here sides toward the revolutionary, not to a developmental sense, and there is a distinction between the two. Language like "absolutely unheard-of legacy" implies a radical breach from something, that which is torn asunder, void of antecedent association. Development, on the other hand, suggests profounder understandings in Church teaching, liturgy, canon law, and so forth, adjusted and made pertinent to the present circumstance, yet still corroborating, affirming and accessing the past, i.e. continuity. To our demise, the revolutionary sense has predominated for the last five decades, and unfortunately its proponents thereof have usurped Newman's theory of the Development of Doctrine, claiming it for themselves.
XI. Things were moving along swimmingly for the "Bologna School" for quite a time until 2005, when a certain Josef Cardinal Ratzinger was installed as pope. It was just a few days before Christmas in that same year when Pope Benedict chucked a wrench into the well-oiled, smooth-running post-Conciliar machine. In Clementine Hall, the Holy Father gave the traditional greeting to the Roman Curia, including statements on "discontinuity and rupture", the "problems" that eventuated after particular "interpretations" of Vatican II were popularized. And let me tell you, the Principesse Bolognesi no likey what e Bavarian speaky. The Pope's now famous remarks, disseminated worldwide, called for a response from his opponents, a counteraction from the now sometimes ascribed "rupturists". This eventually came in 2007, in the form of four essays published in Cristianesimo nella storia, a magazine by the Institute for Religious Studies in Bologna.[16] Herr Christophe was one of the dissenting authors. Still, even with his forthcoming departure, Pope Benedict, with a detectable bluntness, is telling the world that, what Theóbald and his ilk have wrought, has been nothing but decay and dissolution:
My reasonable deduction is that the Bolognese Rupturists were overjoyed when first hearing the news of the Holy Father's abdication.
XII. The third keynote speaker was an American, Richard Gaillardetz, a theologian at Boston College. His SPU conference talk was called "Setting the Agenda for the Church of the Twenty-first Century". Indeed, quite an agenda. Beforehand, however, a little background for context, controversial to say the least. One red flag, among scores, is that, during the U.S. election campaign in 2008, Gaillardetz was a member of Obama's National Catholic Advisory Council.[18] Evidently, Gaillardetz - like those two other intellectual giants Barbra Streisand and Pauly Shore - is absolutely infatuated by a "community organizer" with a Marxist-based educational upbringing. He clearly has no disagreements with Obummer's pro-abortion platform, which can be philosophically categorized as nihilistic Prometheanism, in that the criminal who now occupies the White House believes that babies surviving abortions should be left to die. Hope. This Gaillardetz is so twisted he even had the gall at the time to write that "there is a pro-life candidate out there and it turns out he's a Democrat!"[19] Go team! After that op-ed, he received a rebuke from his bishop, although it was hardly a tough counterpunch. Toledo's Bishop Leonard Blair responded by stating Gaillardetz's heterodox views on abortion "do not reflect the clear and consistent moral position of the United States Catholic bishops".[20] The USCCB? Bishop's Conferences have zero infallibility in Catholic teaching and specific reference should have been made to the Magisterium's infallibility, universally valid, where abortion in all circumstances always has been censured as a grave evil. Well, at least the USCCB finally - after outside criticisms - pulled some of Gaillardetz's antinomian writings from it's For Your Marriage resources website. That said plenty, considering the USCCB/NCCB has been a hive for the "synthesis of heresies" for decades.
XIII. Gaillardetz, a theologian-turned-popularizer, a kind of Catholic version of the "public intellectual", does the standard fare: multiple articles written for America, U.S. Catholic, Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter - all well-known dissenting magazines with weighty measures of defiance against the Holy See. But not the entire gamut of American Catholic periodicals. No entries in his CV for publications at Crisis, certainly not New Oxford Review. The useful idiots at Vox Nova think he's an alright guy, but no need to worry because only effete, make-believe intellectuals write at that blog. Gaillardetz admits standard progressivist influences: Congar, Curran, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Rahner and, if I'm not mistaken, Rodney Dangerfield. He also has the standard dissenter disdain for Orthodoxy, in that he disparagingly speaks of "the youngest generation of priests, too many of whom seem more interested in birettas, cassocks and clerical prerogatives" (i.e. feels threatened by the resurgence of traditionalism), the "Vatican's hounding of American women religious" (as if the politicized/paganized LCWR didn't deserve reprimand/correction by the CDF), "leaders' lack of interest in the laity's insights" (as if a Dictatorship of the Laity hasn't been the case for the last 50 years), "ideologically driven, poor translation of the Roman Missal" (as if current, widespread liturgical abuse is not a problem).[21] Gaillardetz also co-authored a book on Vatican II with SPU professor and conference participant Catherine Clifford, available from Novalis, which is also a standard, insofar as "Catholic" book publishing goes in Canada.
XIV. To compress things into a summary, then, there are three areas where Gaillardetz demonstrates himself to be a heretic and an enemy of the Faith. The first relates to his opinions on moral/life issues (e.g. contraception, homosexuality). Here is Gaillardetz discussing Fr. Francis Sullivan's (colleague at Boston College, another Jesuit, winner of the "John Courtney Murray Award" along with two Canadians, Aquina-kantian Fr. Bernard Lonergan, SJ and excommunicated ex-priest Greg Baum) views on "polygenism and artificial contraception":
Notice specifically: "the Church's teaching on artificial contraception was shattered" in the years following Vatican II. Yet again, the Council is designated as a drastic rift in Christian history, something dazzling happened, the galaxial expansion reverses and the universe implodes into a singularity. Church affairs are "shattered", thus justifying the dissenting viewpoint. No "consensus", he claims, now exists on contraception because of "new developments or new interpretive frameworks" (never precisely defined, of course), and these also apply to Church teachings on homosexualism and women's ordination. Really?
XV. Proscription against contraception has constantly been taught by the Church. The Catechism precisely states it to be "intrinsically evil" (no. 2370). Paul VI's Humanae vitae never has been abrogated, save in the minds of theologians (who aren't part of the Magisterium) and bishops teaching out of communion with the pope (cf. "Winnipeg Statement" of the Canadian bishops). Moreover, the condemnation of contraception has been promulgated by Apostolic Constitution, the highest decree of the infallible Ordinary/Universal Magisterium, as in, for example, Familiaris consortio:
Rather uncomplicated. The same applies to homosexuality and women's ordination.[24]
XVI. The second area where Gaillardetz falls astray, which helps to justify the heresy in the first area outlined above, involves his take on role theologians play in relation to the Church's teaching authority. Unless you're a Protestant, or if you were one of those Gen-X Catholics crappily catechized by a crew cut lesbian nun named Boris, remaining Catholic readers will know without a doubt that the Magisterium alone is the official interpreter and adjudicator of Scripture and Tradition, and that it is the source from which Church doctrine springs. Theologians, like Gaillardetz, do not comprise any part of the Magisterium. Period. Our Yankee friend, of course, balks from this longstanding reality of the Catholic Church. Two examples - the first:
What he is doing here, obviously, is making the infallibility of the Ordinary/Universal Magisterium to be a direct function of the acumen and consent of theologians. Specifically, theologians effectively supersede the Magisterium. But never has there been a "consensus" amongst theologians in the Church's two-thousand year history. Perhaps that was one reason why, err, Christ actualized Peter into a Rock, made him Pope, the Supreme Pontiff, Number 1, the buck stops here. Anyhow, with the handiness and versatility of Gaillardetz 's "inevitable ambiguities", which can be adhered to any subject or anyone at odds with his agenda, never can there be certitude with respect to Church teaching on, say, moral/life issues, like abortion, contraception, buggery and so on. This, of course, is the very intention and trick of Gaillardetz - keep everything suspect, unresolved, in a state of suspended animation, always. He says: "When a truth of divine revelation is taught infallibly by the ordinary universal magisterium, what results is, in effect, a 'non-defined dogma'".[27] This is the reason why he writes that "there are no solemnly defined dogmas that pertain to morals",[28] which seems like a solemnly self-defined dogma to me, if not your run-of-the-mill moral relativism. It is also the reason why he writes, as against the Catechism's definition of heresy (no. 2089), that "the obstinate denial of a definitive doctrine would not necessarily place one outside the Roman Catholic communion",[29] a denial which automatically excuses himself from heresy. Anything goes. The reader will note that infractions against the principle of non-contradiction is commonplace with such people.
XVII. The third area where Gaillardetz comports himself into the realm of the heretical involves ecclesiology, directly correlated with the second area outlined above. He was quoted in an interview around the time of the SPU/V2 conference. The traditional, vertically-inclined, transcendent-orientated structure of...
This is antiquated, according to Gaillardetz - and I really like that allusion to the Illuminati, with its secret society/Masonic/ Rosicrucian/Enlightenment connotations. Oooooooo scary stuff, kids. Instead, a horizontalist configuration is preferred, based on Vatican II, when all was "shattered". There must be "less reliance on Formal Authority", he argues elsewhere. "Conceptions of authority" must "flow from the life of ecclesial communion. A renewed teaching authority, one that is properly situated and exercised within the Church as a communion".[31] This is the New Ecclesiology, prevailing throughout the post-Conciliar era. There is nothing novel here that hasn't been put forward a trillion times since when Flower Power and rebellion against The Man became orders of the day. That is, authority of the Pope/Magisterium is slanted, smudged, collectivized, egalitarianized toward "collegiality", bishops' conferences, coalitions of theologian oligarchs, careerist laymen networks. The pope is merely "the first among equals", as Fr. Rosica recently averred in an orchestrated interview with our State broadcaster.
XVIII. Where Gaillardetz begins to push matters even further to the extreme is when he transmogrifies religious authority into something wholly dependent on a popular vote: "The election of the bishop by the local community is an alternative means of episcopal selection that may reflect the democracies of our modern age".[32] Jean-Jacques Rousseau couldn't have said it better. And so we come to an old error with a new label, to use Bishop Sheen's phraseology. That is, the Conciliarist heresy occurrent around the time of the Great Western Schism. Specifically, that of Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275-1342), as advocated in his work Defensor pacis (1324). Although God is the source of all power, religious authority is restricted from directly wielding it. Rather, the bishops are sidetracked, overridden, because God's power is conferred directly to, and stems from, the people, the so-called "human legislator":
That's just a fancy, medieval way of saying Mob Rule, and those extracted sentences surely have a totalitarian undertone. Note that Marsilius' concept of the "human legislator" was a precursor to Rousseau's "General Will". It's not for nothing some historians refer to Marsilius as The Rousseau of the Conciliar Movement.[34] Plus, we all know what followed in Rousseau's wake. Reminder: French Revolution, Communist Revolution.
XIX. Taken in an ideational context, there really is nothing outstanding in Gaillardetz positions. Visit any dollar store in whatever Modernist neighbourhood and you discover an entire gallery of heretics expounding the same: moral teachings put in doubt via nebulous language so as to justify personal sinful behaviour with an unwillingness to change (which is always the root cause here); magisterial authority placed under suspicion based on some yet to be resolved anomaly upraised into an ultimate determining factor; theologians overstepping their limits as only conduits and clarifiers of doctrine because of a pet theory or a longing for prestige; democratized ecclesiology; Vatican II as the zenith in Church history with its concomitant negation of the past. It's all been done before, a thousand times, and the pattern remains unchanged: no resolution, ever, subtlize everything or push the margins to even greater extremes, all is left open-ended and possibly permissible, which only perpetuates dissent and further destabilizes the Church in the process. Let alone its detrimental trickle-down effect to Catholics on ground level, most of whom are already apathetic, if not ignorantly antagonistic to the two-millennia-old basics of Catholicism.
XX. Hence it's arguable that space has been wasted here covering Gaillardetz's views in these last paragraphs, redundant, useless, sort of like any insight Matthew McConaughey may have on the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Still, it's done for the record and, again, I repeat the important but mostly neglected, unseen, unreported trickle-down effect such criminals have on those Catholics situated at the pyramid's base. This is because Gaillardetz has an exceptional knack for popularization. He's a proficient self-promoter and marketer, which distinguishes him from most heretics. Go to his slick-looking website. "Shop" for books and DVDs, the lecture circuit, listing of "upcoming events", password-only access for special website features. Being an American, Gaillardetz is a Modernist strain of those more populous Neo-Cat salesmen apologists scoping out for big bucks in the blogosphere, a characteristically American phenomenon. And lest we forget, the perfumed beta-males constituting the CCCB were tickled pink to have Gaillardetz give a keynote address at its 2009 plenary. Thus, his influence runs from the bottom right up to the peak of the pyramid.
XXI. So there you have it. Three foreign keynote speakers: a Cardinal figurehead to be stomached for the sake of decorum, a suit and tie Jesuit from the rupturist Bologna School, and an antinomian Conciliarist with an aptitude for salesmanship. In Part 2 of this series we shall analyze the Canadian roster of the SPU/V2 conference participants.
Catch you on the flipside. TH2 signing off.
There is an "anti-Church" within the Church labouring in parishes, deaneries and curial offices in complete opposition to Pope Benedict's teaching that the Second Vatican Council should be interpreted in a hermeneutic of continuity... This anti-Church seems to have existed in hidden form underground for many decades but grasped the Second Vatican Council to come out into the open and now openly preaches in opposition to the public teaching of the Magisterium of the Church.
I. Those comments are apropos lead-ins for the subject matter treated herein, a kind of addendum to Ominous Signs. Another post late after the fact - which will come in three parts, yet the "Vatican II: For the Next Generation" conference held last year at St. Paul University is worthy of a post hoc assessment of involved participants and elaboration on critical points, for three reasons. Firstly, because of a cosmic teleconnection. The 2012 CCCB Plenary took place from September 24 to 28 and the SPU conference from September 27 to 29. There was date and location overlap, a convergence in the apostatic/heretical space-time continuum, so to speak. Where the personages and productions of the CCCB are embodiments of the Modernist hijacking of Vatican II Council, attendees at the SPU conference are its marketers and salesmen. SPU is in Ottawa, located just 131.1 kilometres west-southwest of Hotel Mont-Gabriel in Sainte-Adèle, Québec, according to Google Earth. So, for those conference participants at the CCCB plenary - like salesman/jetsetter Fr. Gilles "I love Armani suits" Routhier, it was just a matter of a short limousine drive up to the airport at fashionable Mont-Tremblant. Check-in, luggage drop-off, redeem those Air Miles, slug down a chocolate martini in the lounge, then board a Porter Airlines' Bombardier Q400, business class, wink to the sexy stewardess, honey roasted almonds snack-pack, fasten your seat belts, METARs read clear and sunny skies on the horizon, activate transponder, go for ignition, runway clear for take-off - and we're rockin' and rollin'. Short flight over the St. Lawrence to Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport. Touchdown on Runway 25. "On time". Yeah, baby, yeah!
II. Secondly, the conference provided a perfectly composed snapshot of the careerist/intelligentsia from assorted sectors inside the establishment church, of how they are working to undermine the Church in Canada from within, and recreating it in their own perverted image. Accordingly, an assessment of their views with a just few volley's will allow for a sizeable flock of Dodo birds to be exposed for the damage they do. These are the people that interact with, and are approved by, the Canadian bishops, consulting, advising, confidants. These are the people the bishops read and to whom they lend their ears. These are the ladder climbers, the celebrity seekers, the aggrandizers, the Professional Catholics, the people who always seem to almost magically obtain key positions in the religious bureaucracy, who get the write-ups in diocesan newspapers, who get the interviews on Salt+Light TV, who win the "awards" and get to hobnob with the right people. These are the enemies of the Church to whom Fr. Blake and Fr. Henry make reference. The SPU conference was a Canadian example of this "anti-Church" in action, actualized, asserting itself for everyone to behold so as to admire and to wonder a great wonder.
III. Thirdly, it was the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, so glitz, glitter and glamour at a gala were necessitous, to formally justify the Modernist-actuated catastrophe we see all around us today, which cries out for criticism. The Canadian stars of the Nu-Church came out, gathered at a Pontifical University now undeniably gone heretical, its loyalty to the Pontificate spent long ago, to celebrate five decades since the Council, to proclaim and hail it as the ultimate triumph of the Church since when the Lord of History was impaled at the intersection of two wooden beams. Not as if these Magic Circle luvvies actually ever contemplate the utter brutality of the Crucifixion, as will be evidenced later. Really, if you mine into the psychological subsurface, if you go way down deep... deep, you will discover the SPU confab to be Swan Song disguised as a Victory Cheer. Conference subtitle: "Reflecting on the importance of the council's teaching for the Church of the 21st century". How majestic, how spectacular, how far-reaching and life-altering. Again, there's that false, anticipatory sense of being on the verge of a new era in global affairs, a "new order of human relations", as the CCCB president voiced a few days earlier at the plenary. The worldwide ennui is about to cease and humanity will imminently be reinvigorated. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades...
IV. In reality, however, time is running out. Orthodoxy/traditionalism is re-emerging, accelerating since 2005 with Pope Benedict. The Age of Aquarius has run its course. That mesmerizing, magnetic, hope-inducing, soul-energizing, purple and orange psychedelic sky seen down range along the horizon - now that we've come in closer proximity to it after a 50-year ride on a party bus with the booze and broads flowing aplenty - has shockingly turned out to be but a mirage. And the aged adolescents who refused to grow up are now aghast in their realization that post-Vatican II playtime is over. Identities are being challenged. Whole careers invested in cornball liturgy, "social justice", ecumenical indifferentism, liberation theology, transcendental meditation, proportionalism, ecofeminism, gender neutrality, homosexuality - these, and more, have proven naught. A reversal is occurring, that which was once theirs is being retaken by an outside force. The desperation, and they're still reluctant to jump from the ship which goes by the name S.S. Minnow. Destination: Gilligan's Island. Everything is imploding around them. You can smell it.
V. Yet if you read the official take on what happened at the conference, of its luminaries and their interpretations of Vatican II, you'd think everything is proceeding as planned. All is well, ye Catholic peoples. Expectedly, an egregious report came from the Associate Editor at the Catholic Register, purportedly "Canada's Catholic News Source". Mr. Swan quoted five persons in his piece, the number skewed to the Left/Modernist end, with the customary pot shots against orthodox Catholicism. Two conference participants, namely Catherine Clifford (SPU professor) and Council peritus Gregory Baum (conveniently omitting he's an excommunicated ex-priest, as Fr. Rosica did in a recent interview with him), including Janet Somerville (associate editor of the now defunct Marxist/radicalist New Catholic Times, Canadian Council of Churches bureaucrat[1]), plus suit and tie Jesuit historian Fr. John O'Malley. After hearing Barry Obama's infamous commencement speech at the University Notre Dame in 2009, O'Malley got so excited he wet his pants, afterward fawning that Obama "embodied and professed in his public persona the spirit of the council".[2] No, that wasn't a quote from Tiger Beat magazine. Of these four favourites, a total of 294 words were quoted, according to my count, and to the token "conservative" (how quaint), namely Fr. Alphonse de Valk (not a conference attendee), only 80 words. And that's the thing about CR's Associate Editor - he evidently thinks everyone is unaware of his unbalanced write-ups, believing his reporting to be fair-minded and neutral, by stating in his article, for example, that the purpose of Vatican II:
...was to weave the past and the future - resourcement and aggiornamento - into a seamless garment. As hard as the Church has worked to pull together those two impulses, other Catholics, conservative and liberal, have tried to pull them apart - or make one end of the spectrum more important than the other.[3]
VI. With the likes of CR's Associate Editor, then, a colossal effort is continuously, vigorously made to conceal the incontestable evidence that a wild, undisciplined, out-of-control aggiornamento has, since 1965, dominated, engulfed, eclipsed the so-called resourcement. Not the inverse and between the two "impulses" never has there been an equilibrium. This is the dirty little secret of the Modernists, of the SPU conference participants. Until recently with the internet emergence, the mainstream CanCatholic media successfully diverted eyes away from this actuality by bombarding us with editorials and accounts on the beauties and beneficences of the "spirit" of Vatican II, and anyone who disagreed was shooed away as some kind of antediluvian crackpot. For instance, here is Baum quoted in the aforementioned CR report:
There are people for whom religion means security. The world changes, everything changes, nothing is reliable. But the one thing that's reliable and is unchanging is the religion they have inherited - not God, but the religion we have inherited. It is a frightening thing.[4]
VII. Fortunately, in the last few years we've had fair, balanced and objective reporting from Deborah Gyapong, who is a godsend as far as I'm concerned. Especially after National Catholic Reporter dude Art Babych was at CCN. Three months before the SPU conference Gyapong provided it coverage, plus giving mention to an online petition started by John Pacheco at SoCon or Bust. It was directed to Abp. Pedro López Quintana, Canada's Apostolic Nuncio, summarizing dissenting views of the more prominent conference participants, requesting it to be sent to one keynote speaker, Peter Cardinal Turkson, asking him "to decline his invitation" thereat. The petition received a total of 582 signatures. Pretty impressive, but to no effect. +Quintana, ordained a priest and appointed bishop by John Paul II, entered the Holy See's diplomatic service in 1984. He served the nunciatures at Madagascar and Philippines, was advisor for the General Affairs of the Secretariat of State to the Apostolic Nuncio office, and is past nuncio for India and Nepal.[6] Accordingly, his reaction to the petition would have been just that: diplomatic, subdued, pleasantries, careful language, no waves. You get a sampling of these in +Quintana's innocuous interview in 2010 with the ever meddlesome and ubiquitous CEO of Salt+Light TV. The latter (drum roll) making sure to mention on-air his awe-inspiring role at World Youth Day 2002, thrice for greater impact. Anyway, when the petition got going in April 2012, +Quintana was probably already scheduled to deliver - and eventually did deliver - an address at the CCCB Plenary later in September,[7] coinciding and closely connected with the SPU conference challenged by the petition. Canon law does stipulate a legate "to send information to the Apostolic See... everything that touches the life of the Church and the good of souls" (no. 364/1). Plausibly, an e-mail was shot off to some intern working in a Dicastery basement. Though it's more likely +Quintana didn't even pass along the information, considering the silence. "Chiquita, file this under Miscellaneous for me. Gracias". Which goes to show that these days a better strategy is to bypass the nunciature altogether. Just cc your complaint letter to the MacNab Manor House as a formality then go direct to Rome. But, then, there is the Vatican bureaucracy with which to contend, let alone the numerous wolf packs stalking throughout the loggias, as Pope Benedict's abdication announcement made obvious.
VIII. KEYNOTE ADDRESS SPEAKERS: The SPU conference had three of them, none Canadian. First, ++Turkson, a Ghanaian prelate and president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, gave an address entitled "Vatican II: A Council of Justice and Peace". Helped by his good looks, amicable character and origin from an exotic land, ++Turkson has that special ability to charm the pants off even heterodox Catholics, as evidenced in an interview with an adoring Bobby Mickens at The Tablet.[8] He likes the press and the press likes him, which is a bad sign. Papabile rumours have floated about ++Turkson since at least 2010.[9] And, soonafter Pope Benedict's stunning announcement, he was letting the international media know that if we "have an African pope, that would be a great recognition of a church that has come of age and a church that is able to contribute to the universal church".[10] A big time no no. Translation: ++Turkson will not be our next pope, if I may make a prediction. Too publicly self-assertive and it appears His Eminence's celebrity has gotten to his head. Unless the canvassing is premeditated to attract criticism, thereby making his authenticity questionable amongst cardinal-electors, hence minimizing election chances. In actuality, the secular media's excitement about him becoming pope is due not so much to ++Turkson's African cultural heritage, and the distinct mode/approach that it might bring to the papacy. Rather, it's his skin colour. A sort of inverse racial profiling by Whitey the Liberal who has that irrepressible desire to showcase his moral superiority and thus feel really, really good about himself. Like those people who put "COEXIST" bumper stickers on their Prius'.
IX. Not to suggest ++Turkson is part of this "anti-Church", nor that he is somehow out of step with the Magisterium. His view against the secular West's racist-inspired population control agenda via abortion in the Third World is on the mark. Additionally, it has been wonderful to see the press go into hysterics after he recently said (correctly) that the Church's priest sex abuse scandal is mainly resultant of homosexual pederasts,[11] which goes to the whole Lavender Mafia network, its sickening entrenchment within Church structures now emerging into public light, thankfully. However, his wishy washy perspective on condoms does gives pause.[12] Nonetheless, ++Turkson was the delegate from Rome, meaning that, as a conference participant, he was the outsider to be tolerated with smiles, sunshine and lollipops. SPU was even gracious enough to confer him an honorary doctorate, which you can see Ottawa's Abp. Prendergast doing here. That +Prendergast is disallowing John Pacheco at SoCon or Bust from organizing a conference in Ottawa - an initiative with a prominent keynote speaker to countervail the SPU/V2 conference, pretty well verifies that, when it comes down to the uncomfortable crunch, +Prendergast is a poser and that all his tough talk (e.g. pro-abort politicians must not receive Communion) is just that: talk. Another good, loyal Catholic layman given the shaft. Another dead end bishop. He's a Jesuit, published by Novalis, so I guess it should have been expected, and we certainly hope +Terry has fun at the next "Theology on Tap". We also observe in the photographs the heresy-pimping Publishing Director at Novalis, which sponsored the SPU/V2 extravaganza, courtesy of Canadian tax dollars. Getting back, had ++Turkson been a CDF rep, instead of a "justice and peace" darling, you can bet Bill Shatner's toupee that the welcome wagon would have performed a U-turn. There is also the question of whether or not anyone in-the-know on the other side of the Atlantic properly advised ++Turkson on all the incestuous Magic Circle intrigue going on betwixt and between St. Paul's, Novalis, OMI and the Canadian bishops. My guesstimate is that Rome is largely oblivious and/or has higher priorities, which explains why St. Paul's undeservingly still retains its status as a Pontifical University. It is also noteworthy that, unlike the other two keynote speakers - giving their addresses in the SPU auditorium (capacity 300), ++Turkson the outsider was relegated to the less capacious university chapel for his talk. A chapel with cafeteria chairs instead of pews, minus kneelers. Groovy.
X. Next up we have another suit and tie Jesuit, a German, by the name of Christophe Theóbald. He's Professor of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology at the Centre Sèvres in Paris. His keynote address went by the title "Vatican II: A Vision for the Future, a Pedagogy of Faith, a Way to Resolve Particular Questions". Purpose: to "illustrate how the corpus of the Council's teaching present new avenues of transmission enabling present and future generations to envision the future of the Church". Excepting technical journals, Theóbald is cited infrequently in popular North American theological conversation (although, his Transmettre un évangile de liberté is distributed by Novalis via Bayard France, and former Timmins Bishop Paul Marchand had a liking in that Theóbald was referenced in a Pastoral Letter [14]). In the context of the SPU conference, however, Theóbald's take on Vatican II necessitates highlighting. This is because he is a disciple of the notorious "Bologna School", founded by the late historian/theologian Giuseppe Alberigo. In terms of influential accomplishments, between 1995 and 2001, Alberigo, along with colleague Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti, were responsible for History of Vatican II. A grand, multi-tome article compilation project (translated into seven languages) covering every aspect and detail of the Council wherein Theóbald,[13] including aforementioned Jetsetter Gilles, contributed articles. Theóbald and company deem the Second Vatican Council as a significant, tantamount irreconcilable, break from ecclesiastical tradition. A taste of Theóbald in action:
None of the twenty preceding councils showed so much daring and ambition: allowing a consensus to emerge among those more than two thousand prelates from all continents and obtain their agreement on the responses to be made to virtually all the questions facing the Church at the dawn of a new age for humanity - such is the absolutely unheard-of legacy of these great twentieth-century assizes.[15]
XI. Things were moving along swimmingly for the "Bologna School" for quite a time until 2005, when a certain Josef Cardinal Ratzinger was installed as pope. It was just a few days before Christmas in that same year when Pope Benedict chucked a wrench into the well-oiled, smooth-running post-Conciliar machine. In Clementine Hall, the Holy Father gave the traditional greeting to the Roman Curia, including statements on "discontinuity and rupture", the "problems" that eventuated after particular "interpretations" of Vatican II were popularized. And let me tell you, the Principesse Bolognesi no likey what e Bavarian speaky. The Pope's now famous remarks, disseminated worldwide, called for a response from his opponents, a counteraction from the now sometimes ascribed "rupturists". This eventually came in 2007, in the form of four essays published in Cristianesimo nella storia, a magazine by the Institute for Religious Studies in Bologna.[16] Herr Christophe was one of the dissenting authors. Still, even with his forthcoming departure, Pope Benedict, with a detectable bluntness, is telling the world that, what Theóbald and his ilk have wrought, has been nothing but decay and dissolution:
...this Council created many calamities, so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed, liturgy trivialized... and the true Council has struggled to materialize, to be realized: the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council.[17]
XII. The third keynote speaker was an American, Richard Gaillardetz, a theologian at Boston College. His SPU conference talk was called "Setting the Agenda for the Church of the Twenty-first Century". Indeed, quite an agenda. Beforehand, however, a little background for context, controversial to say the least. One red flag, among scores, is that, during the U.S. election campaign in 2008, Gaillardetz was a member of Obama's National Catholic Advisory Council.[18] Evidently, Gaillardetz - like those two other intellectual giants Barbra Streisand and Pauly Shore - is absolutely infatuated by a "community organizer" with a Marxist-based educational upbringing. He clearly has no disagreements with Obummer's pro-abortion platform, which can be philosophically categorized as nihilistic Prometheanism, in that the criminal who now occupies the White House believes that babies surviving abortions should be left to die. Hope. This Gaillardetz is so twisted he even had the gall at the time to write that "there is a pro-life candidate out there and it turns out he's a Democrat!"[19] Go team! After that op-ed, he received a rebuke from his bishop, although it was hardly a tough counterpunch. Toledo's Bishop Leonard Blair responded by stating Gaillardetz's heterodox views on abortion "do not reflect the clear and consistent moral position of the United States Catholic bishops".[20] The USCCB? Bishop's Conferences have zero infallibility in Catholic teaching and specific reference should have been made to the Magisterium's infallibility, universally valid, where abortion in all circumstances always has been censured as a grave evil. Well, at least the USCCB finally - after outside criticisms - pulled some of Gaillardetz's antinomian writings from it's For Your Marriage resources website. That said plenty, considering the USCCB/NCCB has been a hive for the "synthesis of heresies" for decades.
XIII. Gaillardetz, a theologian-turned-popularizer, a kind of Catholic version of the "public intellectual", does the standard fare: multiple articles written for America, U.S. Catholic, Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter - all well-known dissenting magazines with weighty measures of defiance against the Holy See. But not the entire gamut of American Catholic periodicals. No entries in his CV for publications at Crisis, certainly not New Oxford Review. The useful idiots at Vox Nova think he's an alright guy, but no need to worry because only effete, make-believe intellectuals write at that blog. Gaillardetz admits standard progressivist influences: Congar, Curran, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Rahner and, if I'm not mistaken, Rodney Dangerfield. He also has the standard dissenter disdain for Orthodoxy, in that he disparagingly speaks of "the youngest generation of priests, too many of whom seem more interested in birettas, cassocks and clerical prerogatives" (i.e. feels threatened by the resurgence of traditionalism), the "Vatican's hounding of American women religious" (as if the politicized/paganized LCWR didn't deserve reprimand/correction by the CDF), "leaders' lack of interest in the laity's insights" (as if a Dictatorship of the Laity hasn't been the case for the last 50 years), "ideologically driven, poor translation of the Roman Missal" (as if current, widespread liturgical abuse is not a problem).[21] Gaillardetz also co-authored a book on Vatican II with SPU professor and conference participant Catherine Clifford, available from Novalis, which is also a standard, insofar as "Catholic" book publishing goes in Canada.
XIV. To compress things into a summary, then, there are three areas where Gaillardetz demonstrates himself to be a heretic and an enemy of the Faith. The first relates to his opinions on moral/life issues (e.g. contraception, homosexuality). Here is Gaillardetz discussing Fr. Francis Sullivan's (colleague at Boston College, another Jesuit, winner of the "John Courtney Murray Award" along with two Canadians, Aquina-kantian Fr. Bernard Lonergan, SJ and excommunicated ex-priest Greg Baum) views on "polygenism and artificial contraception":
For a time it was possible to recognize a theological consensus on the Church's condemnation of polygenism, particularly in the years between Vatican I and Humani generis, but that consensus did not "persevere" among theologians after Vatican II. In like manner, a long-standing consensus regarding the Church's teaching on artificial contraception was shattered in the years after Humanae vitae. In each case, an apparent unanimity dissolved in the face of significant new developments or new interpretive frameworks. I would extend this judgment to include both the teaching on the ordination of women and the moral character of homosexual acts; both have been the subject of considerable theological reflection drawing on new interpretive contexts. Consequently, it would seem difficult to judge any purported consensus regarding these two teachings as one which "perseveres and remains firm".[22]
XV. Proscription against contraception has constantly been taught by the Church. The Catechism precisely states it to be "intrinsically evil" (no. 2370). Paul VI's Humanae vitae never has been abrogated, save in the minds of theologians (who aren't part of the Magisterium) and bishops teaching out of communion with the pope (cf. "Winnipeg Statement" of the Canadian bishops). Moreover, the condemnation of contraception has been promulgated by Apostolic Constitution, the highest decree of the infallible Ordinary/Universal Magisterium, as in, for example, Familiaris consortio:
...the Church condemns as a grave offense against human dignity and justice all those activities of governments or other public authorities which attempt to limit in any way the freedom of couples in deciding about children. Consequently, any violence applied by such authorities in favor of contraception or, still worse, of sterilization and procured abortion, must be altogether condemned and forcefully rejected... couples, by means of recourse to contraception... act as judges of the divine plan, and they manipulate and degrade human sexuality (and with it themselves and their married partner) by altering its value of total self-giving.[23]
XVI. The second area where Gaillardetz falls astray, which helps to justify the heresy in the first area outlined above, involves his take on role theologians play in relation to the Church's teaching authority. Unless you're a Protestant, or if you were one of those Gen-X Catholics crappily catechized by a crew cut lesbian nun named Boris, remaining Catholic readers will know without a doubt that the Magisterium alone is the official interpreter and adjudicator of Scripture and Tradition, and that it is the source from which Church doctrine springs. Theologians, like Gaillardetz, do not comprise any part of the Magisterium. Period. Our Yankee friend, of course, balks from this longstanding reality of the Catholic Church. Two examples - the first:
...where there is no universal and constant consensus of Catholic theologians the infallibility of a teaching of the ordinary Magisterium might itself be called into question.[25]The second:
It is my contention that appeals to the infallibility of the ordinary universal magisterium are ill-suited for resolving controversial matters related to the Christian faith precisely because of the inevitable ambiguities involved in verifying the fulfillment of the conditions for the exercise of the ordinary universal magisterium as outlined in Lumen gentium.[26]
XVII. The third area where Gaillardetz comports himself into the realm of the heretical involves ecclesiology, directly correlated with the second area outlined above. He was quoted in an interview around the time of the SPU/V2 conference. The traditional, vertically-inclined, transcendent-orientated structure of...
The older Church model took an "illuminist theory of divine revelation," in which revelation came "from on high", illuminating Church leaders, with divine revelation "trickling down to the rest of us", Gaillardetz said.[30]
XVIII. Where Gaillardetz begins to push matters even further to the extreme is when he transmogrifies religious authority into something wholly dependent on a popular vote: "The election of the bishop by the local community is an alternative means of episcopal selection that may reflect the democracies of our modern age".[32] Jean-Jacques Rousseau couldn't have said it better. And so we come to an old error with a new label, to use Bishop Sheen's phraseology. That is, the Conciliarist heresy occurrent around the time of the Great Western Schism. Specifically, that of Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275-1342), as advocated in his work Defensor pacis (1324). Although God is the source of all power, religious authority is restricted from directly wielding it. Rather, the bishops are sidetracked, overridden, because God's power is conferred directly to, and stems from, the people, the so-called "human legislator":
The universal body of the citizens or its prevailing part is the human legislator... the election of any principate or other office to be established through election... depends solely on the express will of the legislator... no bishop or priest, as such, has any principate or coercive jurisdiction over any clergy man or layperson, even if that person is a heretic... all bishops are of equal authority.[33]
XIX. Taken in an ideational context, there really is nothing outstanding in Gaillardetz positions. Visit any dollar store in whatever Modernist neighbourhood and you discover an entire gallery of heretics expounding the same: moral teachings put in doubt via nebulous language so as to justify personal sinful behaviour with an unwillingness to change (which is always the root cause here); magisterial authority placed under suspicion based on some yet to be resolved anomaly upraised into an ultimate determining factor; theologians overstepping their limits as only conduits and clarifiers of doctrine because of a pet theory or a longing for prestige; democratized ecclesiology; Vatican II as the zenith in Church history with its concomitant negation of the past. It's all been done before, a thousand times, and the pattern remains unchanged: no resolution, ever, subtlize everything or push the margins to even greater extremes, all is left open-ended and possibly permissible, which only perpetuates dissent and further destabilizes the Church in the process. Let alone its detrimental trickle-down effect to Catholics on ground level, most of whom are already apathetic, if not ignorantly antagonistic to the two-millennia-old basics of Catholicism.
XX. Hence it's arguable that space has been wasted here covering Gaillardetz's views in these last paragraphs, redundant, useless, sort of like any insight Matthew McConaughey may have on the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Still, it's done for the record and, again, I repeat the important but mostly neglected, unseen, unreported trickle-down effect such criminals have on those Catholics situated at the pyramid's base. This is because Gaillardetz has an exceptional knack for popularization. He's a proficient self-promoter and marketer, which distinguishes him from most heretics. Go to his slick-looking website. "Shop" for books and DVDs, the lecture circuit, listing of "upcoming events", password-only access for special website features. Being an American, Gaillardetz is a Modernist strain of those more populous Neo-Cat salesmen apologists scoping out for big bucks in the blogosphere, a characteristically American phenomenon. And lest we forget, the perfumed beta-males constituting the CCCB were tickled pink to have Gaillardetz give a keynote address at its 2009 plenary. Thus, his influence runs from the bottom right up to the peak of the pyramid.
XXI. So there you have it. Three foreign keynote speakers: a Cardinal figurehead to be stomached for the sake of decorum, a suit and tie Jesuit from the rupturist Bologna School, and an antinomian Conciliarist with an aptitude for salesmanship. In Part 2 of this series we shall analyze the Canadian roster of the SPU/V2 conference participants.
Catch you on the flipside. TH2 signing off.
NOTES / REFERENCES
1. Cf. "Roman Catholic (Janet Somerville) new CCC (Canadian Council of Churches) general secretary", Presbyterian Record, September 1, 1997.
2. J.W. O'Malley, "Barack Obama and Vatican II", America, May 25, 2009.
3. M. Swan, "The Church's past weaved into the future", Catholic Register, October 7, 2012.
4. Quoted in ibid.
5. D. Gyapong, "Meeting condemned as conference of 'dissenters'", BC Catholic, June 25, 2012. See also P.B. Craine, "Catholics urge Vatican Cardinal to skip dissenting conference on Vatican II", LifeSite News, July 23, 2012.
6. See CCN, "Spaniard named nuncio for Canada", Western Catholic Reporter, December 21, 2009.
7. D. Gyapong, "Apostolic Nuncio warns of religious freedom threats in Canada", BC Catholic, September 26, 2012.
8. R. Mickens, "The rising star of justice and peace", The Tablet, October 31, 2009.
9. Cf. "The young tearaway who's in the running to be next Pope", The Independent, August 29, 2010.
10. Quoted in J. Bone, "Ghana's Cardinal Peter Turkson eyes papacy", The Australian, February 14, 2012.
11. See D. Gyapong, "Abortion pushed on Third World may have racist agenda, says Cardinal Turkson", Catholic Register, October 1, 2012; and S. Caldwell, "Cardinal tipped to become first black pope in modern times blames gay priests for abuse scandals facing Catholic church", Daily Mail, February 19, 2013.
12. "Cardinal Turkson on Condoms and HIV/AIDS", ZENIT, October 5, 2009.
13. C. Theóbald, "The Church Under the Word of God" In: eds./trans. G. Alberigo, J.A. Komonchak, M.J. O'Connell, History of Vatican II (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), vol. 5, The Council and the Transition, The Fourth Period and the End of the Council, September 1965 - December 1965, pp. 275-320. It's worth subnoting that Orbis Books is notorious for publishing works of dissenters, for years. Orbis is also affiliated with Canada's Novalis, the former listed as a "Distributed Publisher" at the latter's website.
14. P. Marchand, "Being Catholic, a Call, a Challenge", Pastoral Letter, A/3, October 1, 2010.
15. C. Theóbald, "The Theological Options of Vatican II: Seeking an 'Internal' Principle of Interpretation," In: eds. A. Melloni, C. Theóbald, Vatican II: A Forgotten Future? (London: SCM, 2005), Continuum 1005/4, p. 87. See also F. Mastrofini, "The first fifty years of Vatican II", Vatican Insider/La Stampa, February 7, 2012.
16. S. Magister, "Confirmed: The Council was a 'Historic Transition', The School of Bologna Annexes the Pope", Chiesa, December 11, 2007.
17. "Pope Benedict's last great master class: Vatican II, as I saw it", Vatican Radio, February 14, 2013.
18. See membership list at end of article "Donohue and Obama advisors scuffle over Catholic identity, abortion", Catholic News Agency, May 12, 2008.
19. R.R. Gaillardetz, "Who really is the pro-life candidate?", Toledo Blade, September 27, 2008.
20. L.P. Blair, "Reject the Freedom of Choice Act", Toledo Blade, October 4, 2008.
21. R.R. Gaillardetz, "We have the pillars, but the building is still unfinished", National Catholic Reporter, October 11, 2012.
22. R.R Gaillardetz, "The Ordinary Universal Magisterium: Unresolved Questions", Theological Studies, September 2002, no. 3, pp. 147-171.
23. Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio of Pope John Paul II to the Episcopate, to the Clergy, and to the Faithful of the Whole Catholic Church on the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World, pt. 3, II, 30, 32. Given on November 22, 1981.
24. For homosexuality: cf. Catechism (no. 2357); CDF, Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons (June 3, 2003). For women's ordination: cf. Catechism (no. 1577); Code of Canon Law (no. 1024); John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (May 22, 1994); CDF, General Decree regarding the delict of attempted sacred ordination of a woman (December 19, 2007).
25. R.R. Gaillardetz, Witnesses to the Faith: Community, Infallibility, and the Ordinary Magisterium of Bishops (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), p. 28.
26. R.R. Gaillardetz, "Infallibility and the Ordination of Women", Louvain Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 3-24.
27. R.R. Gaillardetz, "The Ordinary Universal Magisterium: Unresolved Questions", Theological Studies, September 2002, no. 3, pp. 147-171.
28. R.R. Gaillardetz, Teaching with Authority: A Theology of the Magisterium of the Church (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997), Theology and Life Series, vol. 41, p. 110.
29. Ibid., p. 263.
30. From D. Gyapong, "Vatican II sets agenda for ongoing renewal, scholars say", BC Catholic, October 4, 2012.
31. R.R. Gaillardetz, Teaching with Authority, pp. 290, 293.
32. Ibid., p. 281.
33. Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace, ed./trans. A. Brett (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, pp. 548-550 (Disc. III, ch. 2). Cf. also commentary by L. Salembier, "Marsilius of Padua", In: The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910). Available online.
34. E.g. F. Hendricks, Vital Democracy: A Theory of Democracy in Action, trans. R. Stuve (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 116: "In Marsilius of Padua's normative theory of the city republic... notions of self-governance and developmental republicanism clearly dominate, which makes him one of the most important predecessors of Rousseau".
