Edit: dropping out of regular church attendance like Holy Steve did has left a lot of middle aged people out of the public eye, and lack of communion has left them rudderless. There’s less room for accountability and more room for deep acedia and despair to set in.
Of course, if all we had was the Novus Ordo, that would be pretty depressing. Who wants to get up on Sunday morning to attend an off the cuff production with crappy music by sexual predators like Marty Haugen with a creepy Pachamana idol looking at you from the sanctuary?
[Market Watch] So-called deaths of despair such as from suicide or alcohol abuse have been skyrocketing for middle-aged white Americans.
It’s been blamed on various phenomenon, including opioid abuse. But a new research paper finds a different culprit — declining religious practice.
The working paper, from Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of The Ohio State University, looked at the relationship between religiosity and mortality from deaths of despair. The paper was circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Edit: the Pornokardinal is incensed that ++Gänswein outed him to the rest of the liberals by mentioning how he supported Benedict accepting his election as pontiff.
Viennese cardinal confirms information from Benedict XVI's private secretary: "Yes, that was so. So far, I have deliberately kept silent about it." Reprimand for publication: "Unseemly indiscretion."
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn was the person who, in the event of his election as Pope, encouraged Joseph Ratzinger to accept this decision of the conclave. This small "revelation" can be found in the book written by the long-time papal secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein under the title "Nothing but the truth" ("Nient'altro che la verita"), which was published last week in Italian.
Cardinal Schönborn confirmed Gänswein's statements on Wednesday, according to which he, Schönborn, had written Cardinal Ratzinger "a letter just in case" before the conclave. "Yes, it was. So far, however, I have deliberately kept silent about it, although it happened within the framework of the Cardinal Assembly, and not at the conclave itself," said the Archbishop of Vienna.
At the same time, the cardinal distanced himself from Gänswein's book project, calling it an "unseemly indiscretion." Schönborn said: I don't think it's right that such confidential things are published, especially by the personal secretary."
Benedict's "Guillotine" speech
Specifically, the private secretary of Benedict XVI. refers in his book in the chapter on "Schönborn's letter" ("La lettera di Schönborn") to a speech by the newly elected Pope a few days earlier to a German group of pilgrims on April 25, 2005. At that time, Benedict XVI. spoke surprisingly openly about his emotional state at the conclave and said: "When slowly the course of the votes made me realize that the guillotine would fall on me, so to speak, I felt dizzy. (...) I said to the Lord with deep conviction: Do not do this to me! You have younger and better people who can approach this great task with a completely different vigour and strength. I was very touched by a small letter written to me by a confrere from the College of Cardinals."
The fact that Cardinal Schönborn was meant by the "confrere" mentioned by the Pope has only now been made public by Gänswein with his book.
And what was the content of the letter? Benedict XVI. also gave detailed information about this in his speech to his compatriots at that time: "He (Schönborn, note) reminded me that I had placed the sermon at the divine service for John Paul II from the Gospel under the word that the Lord said to Peter at the Sea of Galilee: Follow me! I had shown how Karol Wojtyla received this call from the Lord again and again and had to give up a lot again and again and simply say: Yes, I follow you, even if you lead me where I did not want to."
The confrere (Schönborn, note) wrote to me: If the Lord should now say to you, 'Follow me', then remember what you preached. Don't refuse! Be obedient, as you said of the great departed Pope. That fell into my heart. The ways of the Lord are not comfortable, but we are not made for convenience, but for the great, for the good."
With Benedict XVI. the Du form of informality
Gänswein also mentions in his book that Schönborn and Ratzinger were on a first-name basis. Apart from Benedict's childhood friends, Cardinal Schönborn, who belonged to the Ratzinger circle of students, was one of the few who addressed his former teacher as you, writes Gänswein.
The second episode described in Gänswein's book - a short but very personal conversation between the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI. and Cardinal Schönborn - had also happened in this way, confirmed the Archbishop of Vienna
[Cuzz Blue] The NHL over the past year has made a concerted effort to portray itself as America’s most woke sports league, even at the expense of player safety. On Tuesday night, however, an NHL player actually decided to take a stand against his own team’s effort to push the woke agenda.
Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, refused to wear his team’s gay pride jersey Tuesday night. He explained that he made a choice to stay true to himself and his faith.
Provorov also made clear that he respects those who have a different view from him and did not elaborate further.
[RMX] Following the mass riots involving migrant youth on New Year’s Eve, German-Iranian author and commentator Behzad Karim Khani is criticizing the debates about the young men of foreign origin, which he says are fueled by historical racism. He asserts that regardless of what Germans think about the riots, migrants are not only going to stay in the country but will eventually “inherit Germany” from ethnic Germans, who are “dying off.”
Khani, who was accepted to Germany as a political refugee from Iran, along with his family, when he was 10 years old, writes that migrants will inherent Germany. He adds that time is on the side of migrants, as ethnic Germans are “dying out.”
With Cardinal George Pell, the Church loses the admonishing voice of a conservative that some tried to stifle during his lifetime.
(Rome) Five days after the funeral of Benedict XVI. the Australian Cardinal George Pell died yesterday at the age of 82. The Cardinal was energetic and a powerful voice of the Church. Not everyone liked that. Hardly any churchman in recent times has had a more cruel example set to limit his ministry and break his influence. Before the 2013 conclave, he was still considered a papabile, but a few years later he was pilloried. But he couldn't be broken.
George Pell, the son of a Catholic mother and an Anglican father, was ordained a priest in 1966 for the Australian diocese of Ballarat in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. He completed his studies at the Pontifical Urbaniana University and the University of Oxford in England, where he was also resident chaplain at the elite college Eton. Returning to Australia in 1971, he has held various pastoral positions as well as senior positions in Catholic education.
In 1987 Pope John Paul II appointed him Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne. In 1996 he became archbishop of this diocese. In 2001 he was appointed to the more important Bishop's See of Sydney and in 2003 he was made a cardinal.
Since Pell was the only bearer of the purple in Oceania, Pope Francis nolens volens appointed him to the Council of Cardinals he had set up, in which – according to the initial idea – every continent should be represented by a cardinal. In order to remove him from his strong position in Australia, he was "promoted away" by Francis to the Roman Curia in 2014 and appointed the first prefect of the newly established Economic Secretariat. The able administrator initially experienced a culture shock with his British sobriety in Rome. He would probably have come to terms with that, but he wanted to dutifully fulfill his task and thus stumbled into a wasp's nest. The aftermath was incredible.
While he ran into walls in Rome and encountered resistance of an unexpected kind, an attack on his integrity was being prepared in Australia, which was to mark the rest of his life. It all started with a media campaign branding the cardinal a sexual abuser. The abuse scandal that has ravaged the church for the past 15 years has revealed a major wound inflicted on the Church by a small group of perpetrators. Dealing with it overtaxed some shepherds, others covered up culpably. To this day, the main evil, homosexuality, has not been named, least of all by Pope Francis.
Only: Cardinal Pell was not guilty of anything. He had neither sexually abused nor covered for abusers. [Risedale?] However, he was blamed for all of this. The example of Pell showed that the abuse scandal - as if it weren't bad enough in itself - was also misused as a means of killing: inside the Church to get opponents out of the way, outside the Church because a media mob, far removed from the Church, was willingly on every move pounces on a weapon, with which the Church can be attacked.
The theory that the abuse scandal unleashed against Cardinal Pell in Australia had its origins in the Vatican in order to get rid of him as Prefect of the Economic Secretariat has survived to this day.
Caught in the grip of the Roman resistance and the unjust Australian accusations, Pell chose a path that astounded and deserved great respect. In Rome he had to realize with disappointment that Pope Francis, who had called him, did not stand behind him when it came to overcoming the Vatican resistance because the individual dicasteries did not want to have their finances looked at. Rather, in 2016, Francis had sided with the other side and massively restricted Pell's responsibilities. It had displeased Santa Marta that the Australian defended the Church's doctrine of marriage and morals at the 2014 Synod of Families and signed a letter to Francis with 12 other cardinals in 2015 protesting pre-packaged findings at the Synod of Bishops on the family. It was no less displeasing that Pell also took a negative stance towards the innovations contained in the controversial post-synodal exhortation Amoris laetitia.
When Francis effectively ordered him to return to Australia and face the allegations, the cardinal decided to leave Rome in June 2017 to do just that and take up the fight against the criminal slanders. Pope Francis did nothing to save his collaborator. Apparently the opportunity to get rid of the Australian who had become a nuisance was even welcome. The New York Times rejoiced that resistance within the Church against Francis had been massively weakened within a few days. Just a day after Pell's departure, Francis had dismissed Cardinal Gerhard Müller as Prefect of the Faith. And the death of Cardinal Joachim Meisner opened new avenues for the Church in Germany, which has an above-average influence on the pontificate of Francis.
Without Roman backing, Pell had become fair game in his homeland. His case became an eyesore to Australia's media, who prejudiced him for taking pleasure in bringing down such a high Conservative Catholic dignitary. The German-speaking area had already experienced the unleashing of these base instincts by a hunting party against churchmen in the 1990s.
The actions of the Australian judiciary were not a glorious page either. The public prosecutor's office seemed to have misunderstood the abuse scandal as a "license" for a "witch hunt". Cardinal Pell was tried and sentenced by an apparently media-hyped jury on December 11, 2018 to a long prison term for alleged sexual abuse, becoming the first man in purple in history. The very next day, Pope Francis threw him out of the Council of Cardinals. In this situation, too, the deeply injured Pell took a very unusual path. To underline his innocence, pending the second instance, he refused to apply for a stay of detention or house arrest, but went to prison. The world hadn't seen that either.
In the second instance, the conviction was then confirmed by a panel of judges on August 21, 2019, but one of the three judges took a contrary position and pointed out all the weaknesses and errors of Pell's conviction (see also "Cardinal Pell is innocent, his accusers are not "). In the Supreme Court, on April 7, 2020, the cardinal finally won in full by a vote of seven to zero. The verdict was received, the cardinal was acquitted and immediately released from prison.
Pell had to spend more than a year in various Australian prisons and kept a prison diary there, which shows great intellectual and spiritual maturity and strength, and which he subsequently published. From prison, the cardinal also commented on ecclesiastical questions and warned against wrong paths in connection with the Amazon Synod. The deeper reason for the nightmare he had to go through can probably also be seen in his positions within the Church.
At least some Australian media had the decency to apologize to Pell afterwards. Others haughtily persisted and tried desperately to find new charges. [There’s a lot of real evidence about Pell which less independent minded influencers don’t address, as if there is an agenda to shoehorn Pell into the role of a lion of orthodoxy.]
Pope Francis refused to receive his cardinal for more than half a year. Was the acquittal so inconvenient? After the lack of backing in Rome, but also in the trial, Francis also refused the visible rehabilitation of the cardinal, whom an official audience would have meant in front of everyone.
What's more, instead of waiting for the courts to go through, Francis dismissed him as prefect of the economic secretariat while the proceedings were still ongoing. The signal was fatal and, as expected, was interpreted to mean that Santa Marta was also convinced of Pell's guilt.
On October 12, 2020 the time had finally come. Francis received the cardinal, but only in a private audience, and no longer gave the 79-year-old churchman any office, not even an honorary office, that would have shown appreciation. The “Pope of Gestures” also set standards in this way.
Cardinal Pell, however, continued on his way wherever he could. He gave catechesis, defended church moral teaching against liberal Jesuits in public discussions, such as in Oxford in 2021, warned against synodality with ulterior motives, criticized the secret agreement with the People's Republic of China and was skeptical about the motu proprio Traditionis custodes.
A few days ago he attended the funeral of Benedict XVI, whom he admired. Now he himself has been dismissed.
Edit: from the pathetic “Catholic Spirit”. The USCCB is calling upon Catholics to honor a man who beat up white sex workers. It’s not really surprising to find the USCCB asking Catholics to celebrate or support evil and evil men.
Catholics “must act” for racial justice, starting with personal conversion, to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle and eliminate racial injustices in society, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stated.
[Catholic Spirit] Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio of the U.S. Archdiocese of the Military Services in his statement immediately referred to the call to action from Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, one of six Black Catholic women and men proposed for sainthood.
“People keep saying, ‘Where’s the next Martin Luther King?’ We’re all called, I think. We’re called by our citizenship, by our membership in the human race. We’re all called to free ourselves and to free one another,” Sister Bowman said.
One of King's closest friends, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, wrote a book in
1989 in which he talked about King's penchant for white prostitutes. King would often use church donations to have drunken sex parties, where he would hire two to three white prostitutes, occasionally beating them brutally. This has also been reported by the FBI agents who monitored King. King was married with four children.
Edit: DavidQ aka David Icke posted this. It looks like Taytay found a tweet from two years ago and thought it was current. We share his enthusiasm, but Gibson’s communication guy claims they have no interest in coining the project earlier last year. You can thank the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt for putting a stop to this outrage!! Oy!
Taylor Marshall deleted the tweet, we presume, because he found out he was tweeting old news! But look at his enthusiasm for this film!
Edit: in a world that’s turned its back on God, millions of Catholics still demonstrate the simple Catholic Faith, trusting that God will even heal their infirmities.
The image was carved by a Mexican artist and brought to the Philippines in 1609.
[Newsweek] The Feast of the Black Nazarene image of Jesus Christ, believed to be miraculous by Catholics, drew around 523,000 devotees on Monday, the Quiapo command center of the Philippine National Police (PNP) reported.
The current crowd count is down from pre-Covid numbers. The Plandemic has a long reach.
National Police Guard Catholics from Muslim killers
Meanwhile, Muslims are brazenly planning and accomplishing acts that put January 6th to Shame
Edit: if Minnesota weren’t the home of a violent and militant Islamic minority, we wouldn’t be worried about a professor teaching art history showing renderings of Mohamed.
Catholics attempting to cash in on the victim grievance deck are going to lose. These are agendas to fit Leftist ideologies.
[Hyperallergic] Mustafa ibn Vali, “The Angel Gabriel meets ‘Amr ibn Zaid (the Shepherd)” (c. 1595), depicting the Archangel Gabriel and shepherd ‘Amr ibn Zaid from the Siyer-i Nebi (the Life of the Prophet) (via The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Hamline University, a private liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota, has reportedly declined to renew the contract of a professor who showed their students Medieval paintings depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. On October 6, 2022, the adjunct professor, whose name has not been disclosed, displayed the images during an online lecture.
The incident gained traction after a student in attendance, Aram Wedatalla, president of the university’s Muslim Student Association (MSA), raised the issue with university administrators following a conversation with the professor.
As reported by Hamline University’s student newspaper The Oracle on December 6, a video recording of the lecture, alongside shared email correspondence between the professor and Wedatalla, indicated that the professor issued a two-minute content warning.
This warning was meant to allow students who were uncomfortable with viewing the images to exit the call or shut off the video component of the Google Meet room prior to proceeding with the Powerpoint slides featuring the images in question.
“I am showing you this image for a reason,” the professor said in the video, according to The Oracle. “And that is that there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.”
Edit: His Holiness was truly one of the least destructive popes of the late 20th century, and that's saying something. What will the Benevacantists do now?
It's been hard not having a pope with his intelligence and sensitivity on the throne. Even though he was a liberal, he was a lot more loving and sincere than most others.
Of course, his funeral Mass will likely be a post-V2 canonization Liturgy with music by sex predator David Haas. I'm guessing it will, best case, be a "reverent" Novus Ordo in Latin. The best outcome would be a full pontifical High Mass according to the pre-1955 Missal.
CGIL, one of Europe's largest left-wing trade unions, received in audience by Pope Francis.
(Rome) An unusual premiere took place yesterday in the Great Audience Hall of the Vatican. Pope Francis received the leadership and a large delegation of the left-wing trade union CGIL in a special audience.
The Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), General Italian Trade Union Confederation, was founded in 1944 by the communists, socialists and Christian democrats united in the struggle against fascism and its National Socialist allies, i.e. the forces that were to determine Italian post-war policy until 1992. When the Stalinist, strictly Moscow-oriented Communist Party (PCI) wanted to use the CGIL and the alliance after 1945 to turn Italy into a Soviet republic, the trade union unity that still exists in the German-speaking world today collapsed. In 1948/1950, the Christian trade unions and those socialists who wanted to escape the close embrace of the Communist Party separated from the CGIL and founded their own trade union confederations, the Christian CISL and the socialist UIL. In the political fragmentation, other trade union confederations were added. However, the three leagues confederated and were granted by the state the exclusive right to conduct collective bargaining.
From 1948 at the latest, the CGIL was the trade union of the communists and the popular frontists. Anyone who was a union member did not have to be a party member. But those who wanted to become politically active had to do so in the Communist Party. Dissent was not tolerated. In the troubled 70s, when the turn to the left seemed possible, non-orthodox leftists tried to take over the Christian trade union in order to lead it into a popular front with the communists and thus prepare the establishment of a "people's democracy".
The CGIL now has 5.5 million members (CISL 4.1 million, UIL 2.2 million). The largest non-Confederate union today is the UGL, founded in 1996 with 1.8 million members, which is close to Matteo Salvini's Lega and Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia.
While the CISL always maintained good contacts with the Christian Democrats and the Church, the CGIL stood on the anti-Church barricades. All socio-political struggles against the natural order were supported by the CGIL propagandistically, financially and on the streets, especially the legalization of the killing of unborn children. Most recently, it has called for discrimination against doctors who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to assist in abortions.
The Italian Communist Party underwent some metamorphoses from 1991 onwards when, after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), then to the Left Democratic Party and finally to the Democratic Party following the US model. (PD). The latter is a joint project of the former communists and the former left wing of the Christian Democrats. At the trade union level, however, no rapprochement had so far been shown because of the strong Christian trade union.
Under Pope Francis, whose embrace of the political left is well known, new alliances are emerging, as was the case yesterday with the first large audience for the hard-left trade union CGIL, which is still the trade union rallying point of the radical left.
Work, Peace, Fraternity. Pope Francis with GGIL Secretary General (Chairman) Maurizio Ladini (prevented)
In his extensive criticism of abuses in the world of work to the detriment of workers, Pope Francis managed to address the "pandemic years" without finding a word of comfort for the incredible harshness with which the Italian governments at the time forced entire professional groups such as doctors, medical personnel, police, military, teachers to "vaccinate" with an experimental genetically modified preparation or were suspended without salary. Francis also did not find a word about the fact that the Italian state imposed a fine on all over 50-year-olds who did not "get vaccinated" (the payment of which was suspended by the new government until June 30, 2023) and excluded them from the world of work.
Why the Pope is silent on this is obvious: because he himself had introduced these hardships even more radically for the employees of the Vatican State and the Holy See. Measures that have not yet been repealed. Why Francis, however, partly imitated these radical measures, and partly anticipated them, is still unclear.
Here is the full translation of his address to the leadership and the numerous delegation of the General Italian Trade Union Confederation CGIL:
Dear Brothers and Sisters, good morning!
I welcome you and thank the Secretary-General for his words. This meeting with you, one of Italy's historic trade union organisations, invites me to renew my attachment to the world of work and, in particular, to the people and families who are struggling the most.
There is no union without workers, and there are no free workers without unions. We live in a time which, despite technological progress – and sometimes precisely because of this perverse system called technocracy (cf. Laudato Si', 106-114) – has somewhat disappointed expectations of justice in the field of work. This requires, first and foremost, a new beginning in terms of the value of work as a place where personal vocation and social dimension meet. Work enables man to realize himself, to live in brotherhood, to cultivate social friendships and to improve the world. The encyclicals Laudato si' and Fratelli tutti can help to follow educational paths that provide reasons for commitment in today's world.
Work builds society. It is a primary experience of citizenship, in which a community of destiny is born from the commitment and talents of each individual; this community is much more than the sum of the various professional abilities because everyone is recognized in relation to others and for others. And so the fabric of "democracy" is brought to life day by day in the ordinary web of connections between people and economic and political projects. It is a fabric that is not woven at the desk in some palaces, but with creative diligence in factories, workshops, farms, trade, crafts, on construction sites, public administrations, schools, offices and so on. It comes "from below", from reality.
Dear friends, when I recall this vision, it is because one of the tasks of the trade union is to educate in the meaning of work and to promote fraternity among workers. This educational concern must not be missing. It is the salt of a healthy economy capable of making the world a better place. In fact, "the human price is always an economic price, and economic ills always demand a human price. Stopping investing in people in order to get a greater immediate return is bad business for society" (Laudato si', 128).
In addition to training, it is always necessary to point out the distortions of work. The culture of waste has crept into economic relations and has also penetrated the world of work. This is the case, for example, where human dignity is trampled underfoot by gender discrimination – why does a woman have to earn less than a man? Why send a woman away as soon as you see that she is getting "fat" in order not to pay for maternity leave? It manifests itself in the precarious situation of youth – why do people have to postpone their life decisions because of the chronic precariat? – or in the culture of redundancy; and why are the most demanding jobs still so poorly protected? Too many people suffer from unemployment or unworthy work: their faces deserve to be heard, and they deserve the commitment of the trade unions.
In particular, I would like to share with you a few concerns. Firstly, the safety of workers. Your Secretary-General has spoken about this. There are still too many deaths – I see them in the newspapers: every day there is someone – too many mutilated and injured people at work! Every death at work is a defeat for society as a whole. We should not only count them at the end of each year, but remember their names, because they are people, not numbers. Let us not allow profit and man to be equated! The idolatry of money tends to trample on everything and everyone and not appreciate differences. It is about educating us to take care of workers' lives and educate us to take safety rules seriously: only a wise alliance can prevent those "accidents" that are tragic for families and communities.
A second concern is the exploitation of humans as if they were performance machines. There are violent forms, such as the "caporalato"1 and the enslavement of workers in agriculture or on construction sites and other workplaces, the coercion of workers into grueling layers, the downward play in contracts, the disregard for motherhood, and the conflict between work and family. How many contradictions and how many wars between the poor take place around work! In recent years, the number of so-called "working poor" has increased: people who, despite working, are unable to feed their families and give them hope for the future. The union – listen carefully – is called upon to be the voice of the voiceless. They have to make noise to give a voice to the voiceless. In particular, I would like to commend you for taking care of young people, who are often forced into precarious, inadequate, even slave-like contracts. I thank you for any initiative that promotes an active labour policy and protects human dignity.
In addition, during these pandemic years, the number of those quitting their jobs has increased. Young and old are dissatisfied with their profession, the climate in the workplace, the forms of contract and prefer to quit. They are looking for other options. This phenomenon does not mean disconnecting, but humanizing work. Here, too, trade unions can take preventive action by focusing on the quality of work and helping people find a job that better matches their talents.
Dear friends, I invite you to be "guardians" of the world of work, creating alliances and not sterile contradictions. People thirst for peace, especially at this historic moment, and everyone's contribution is fundamental. Peace education, even in the workplace, which is often marked by conflict, can become a sign of hope for all. Also for future generations.
Thank you for what you do and will do for the poor, the migrants, the infirm and disabled, and the unemployed. Don't forget to also take care of those who do not join the union because they have lost faith and make room for youthful responsibility.
I entrust you to the protection of Saint Joseph, who knew how beautiful and laborious it is to do his work well and how satisfying it is to earn bread for the family. Let's look at him and his ability to educate through work. I wish you all and your loved ones a peaceful Christmas. May the Lord bless you and Our Lady protect you. And if you can, please pray for me. Thank you!
Text/Translation: Giuseppe Nardi Image: Vatican.va (Screenshots)
Trans: Tancred vekron99@hotmail.com
1 "Caporalato" in Italian means migrant workers who work irregularly in agriculture, often earn only half of the regular helpers, but have to work longer.
