Saturday, March 15, 2014

The Latest Vortex


Thanks to readers who gave me a heads-up on our great warrior Michael Voris' latest Vortex.

Janet Baker has responded HERE.

I couldn't agree more with the following:

First, he seems to think that the only ones noticing the miscues of Pope Francis are "extreme left" and "extreme right". That's simply not true; every now and then Voris intimates that he himself has noticed them (See 2:58-3:03, 3:10-3:13, 4:30). In artificially dividing them into two camps of either progressive liberals or sedevacantists without acknowledging any honorable motives on the part of us who also see the problems, he demonizes us.

and this:

At 3:48-4:15, Voris launches into those on "the right", stating that all in this group attack the Holy Father as a person. That's simply not true.

I would mention that Michael does specifically mention the misunderstandings of Ubi Petrus Ibi Ecclesia, Where Peter is, there is the Church (St. Ambrose). The unity of the Church is centered upon the Office of the Pope.

Michael states that many conflate the man who is the current Pope with the Office of the Pope. Mike blames the consternation over Pope Francis on the misunderstanding.

Given this context, it is possible Michael meant to limit his observations to the select group who have taken flight from Ark.

I do believe it is of critical importance to be clear about the context of the concerns being raised and to be a witness to unity with Christ's Church.

I can be no more divided from Christ and His One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, His Sacraments, Magisterium and Office of the Pope than I could decapitate myself and go on living.

It is impossible. Christ's Church and I are indivisible. His Blood runs through my veins and my animus is connected to His Head.

I'm not going anywhere and I have gone overboard to ensure that anything I've written or said navigates through a Pope who is going to instruct the faithful to obstruct catechesis and disobey Church teaching.

We find a faithful priest and we ride out the storm. We increase our consumption of the Sacraments.

Recently, Michael did a Vortex named "stop doing the interviews". I presumed it was about the Pope. It turned out to be about that poor simpleton in New York who is yelling bravo when people use the media to announce they are sexually active with a person or persons of the same sex.

Compare that vortex to the vortex implying it is some kind of flaw of fringe to raise concerns when "the pope said this or the pope said that".

How does Michael reconcile his own shtick to the same actions he opines is a scandal and 'weakens the Church'?!!

Michael has been, and is, a great warrior in the battle between good and evil. He has drawn a line in the sand, explained he cannot raise concerns about the confusion coming from the Pope.

Fine.

Love ya Mike, but to produce a video claiming criticizing Church leaders is divisive to unity and a scandal is as mad as a hatter given your own vocation!

Look around us. "Criticism" about the antics of kooky priests and bishops have done catastrophic damage to unity. Yet raising concerns about the undisciplined kooky statements, actions and inactions is your role for Christ's Church.

It's precisely what you've been doing.

You can't have it both ways.

What is good for the goose, is good for the gander.

Kooky takes prisoners. It is a virtue to release imprisoned from vices they are brainwashed into believing acceptable to God.

The "who" of the sad state of affairs doesn't matter. Even when it is the Pope.

As you have mentioned yourself, we are united to the Office.


As I have mentioned before, not everyone is endowed with the gifts to rise to the occasion and accept a role in Church Militant.

I do NOT mean to imply this role is superior in Christ's army. It is in fact, inferior to the endowments that lift the mission of the Church in the daily Eucharist, in front of the Blessed Sacrament, in mystical prayer with the communion of Saints.

I see the role as a penance. After conversion, when our conscience recognizes the harm we have done, Christ asks How much do you love Me?

Amen, amen I say to thee, when thou wast younger, thou didst gird thyself, and didst walk where thou wouldst. But when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and lead thee whither thou wouldst not.

Mike's doing a great job. He's issued a limitation. I respect it, but it is not good enough for my children and the people I love and care about.

Let us face reality. We do not know this Pope and we do not recognize his voice. The words coming out of his mouth and the omissions and obstructions to Church teaching is inconsistent with the voice of my Shepherd.

This is an instinct that we cannot control.

Our mind is hearing his messages and when we compare them to the Deposit of Faith, they contradict 2000 years of doctrine. Our unity is with our Church, not the man.

This is a conflict and leaders need to rise to the occasion.

Do we follow the voice telling us to contradict Church teaching?

No.

Do we sit silent as the man sitting in the Chair instructs generations of Catholics, including our own children, to contradict Church teaching?

No.

So what now?

Keep denying there is a problem with the Pope?

Keep pretending it doesn't contradict Church teaching?

Let us face it.

The Pope has not stretched forth his hands in his role as Pope and bound himself to the Deposit of Faith.

He has and does bind his own soul. Nobody denies that he, himself, is a faithful son.

But in his role as Pope, he is as running from Nero as Peter's legacy in Quo Vadis.

This doesn't make him unworthy of the role, does it.

He is not the first, the second or the third who has taken flight from the binding of the role of a Pope.

Great saints in our history have chased after them.

Let us not make a mockery out of what is right and true and just.

I love Pope Francis. Each time I see him or watch him, I am drawn into his intimacy and love for Christ and all of us.

But he is moseying on down the road away from Rome. He is estranged from his role as the custodian of the Deposit of Faith.

Like Peter and many before him, he has not yet accepted the role of a martyr.

Pope Francis is confusing the masses and those of us with children, grandchildren, relatives - or in fact any loved one, want and in fact need to tell them not to listen to kooky ideas and the reasons why.

After a kooky idea is proclaimed, pointing to the truth is not intended to be a condemnation of the person who presented the kooky idea.

If the author of a kooky idea feels condemned in the contradiction to truth, the onus for such condemnation is upon them.

My focus is my children and the people I love. A wrong needs to be righted.

I can't imagine how Michael manages to silence this righteous call that echoes from our soul.

This is a terrible situation but I can't and don't have any desire to silence that call.

I am focused on serving Christ. All the way baby. Nothing is going to divide me from the truth. Not even a Pope.

A few things I feel important to point out.

a) This is not simply an abstract battle for the soul of the Church where people are clapping or apoplectic depending upon who is in the seats of power.

Yes, we are active participants in the battle between good and evil. But our most important duties do not lie on the internet. The substance of our mission happens on the ground in our lives. The real world of the people around us. Our relatives and friends.

Do I want my children to make judgments on their actions based upon the Pope's statements caricaturing doctrine as irrelevant pishposh?

Do I want my children to stop making judgments on moral theology because the Pope told them he and the Church do not?

Do I want the lethal combination of defiance and Sacrilegious Communion to compound the ill effects of dissent being rammed down their throats on the parish level?

You would have to be a fool to choose silence as the effects of this papacy does this to our children and the people we love.

We know the very real and physical effects upon the soul and intellect.

Much like giving chemotherapy to a healthy person, it is chemically destructive.

The Pope has the power to change Church law.

If he is going to unravel 2000 years of sanity, he needs to fortify his actions officially so we can all move on.

Let him memoralize his edict that we can dump our wives, husbands and children as many times as we wish, ad infinitum, right into Church law.

Let him write civil unions as acceptable into the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Let him state, ex Cathedra, that using contraception and killing children does not obstruct salvation so long as we focus on the real evil of lonely people and visit Eleanor Rigby in the nursing home.

Until he does that, my children are not released from the effects of sin upon their intellect and soul and he is poisoning them - just like Cardinal Dolan and every other half-witted prelate we have had the misfortune to encounter on the road to salvation.

Let's have the decency to be honest about the physical science of sin. It is real and has catastrophic effects upon the lives of people led clapping into sacrilegious communion.

So long as his pronouncements, irrespective of what he intended to convey, instruct us all to ignore, obstruct and disobey Church teaching, I need to tell them to ignore the man, even though he is sitting in the Chair of Peter.

Just like I told them to ignore the priest who told them the Sacrament of Confession is for lunatics. Just like I removed them from the parishes of our ladies of the mattress.

b) The Pope needs to hear and know what we intend to do in the madness of following his instructions to disobey the small-minded rules of Church teaching at every parish in Christendom.

For thirty two years, I've tried to show them, and be a witness to how to tie oneself to the Deposit of Faith and the Sacraments and ride out the storm, come what may.

Now, I have a Pope trying to untie them and unite them to himself and instruct them to disobey Church teaching.

I'm going to sit silent?

I don't think so.

I need my children to hear that if they have an attraction to have sex with another person and those urges are outside of a Sacramental Marriage in the Catholic Church, they need to make a judgment about that attraction, the Church makes a judgment about that transaction and Christ makes a judgment about that attraction. That attraction requires a judgment that it is wrong to act upon it. My children need to hear that the judgment of the Church is right judgment and in complete harmony with Christ's judgment. My children need to hear that the consequences of not making judgments in harmony with Church teaching.

With all the confusing statements coming from the Pope's own mouth, I keep refreshing my browser waiting for him to tell my children. After a year of doing so, I have given up. I'm done with it. It is time to tell them myself that something is askew with the Pope's judgment.

This doesn't mean I don't love our Holy Father, continue to pray for him, but I do not take a shine to his unraveling and I am going to do and say everything I can to tie my children back onto the Ark. That is my fiat as a Catholic mother.

And, my second fiat is to be a witness to anyone else I have the ability to influence how to navigate through this storm.

We all know the Pope is not going to change Church teaching, don't we?

He knows he can't and is trying to find ways to circumvent it.

No can do.

Get thee back to Rome!

8 comments:

Restore-DC-Catholicism said...

I can understand and even sympathize with the visceral reaction against criticizing the Holy Father's words and actions. However, we cannot let our natural repugnance blind us to the truth that slaps us in the face. Those who are so self-blinded must be resisted and rebuked when they try to cajole other good people into joining in on the blindness.

Anonymous said...

Welcome to Protestantism. It started with the best of intentions.

Steve Dalton said...

Voris needs to understand this old saying: a fish rots from the head down. The rot we have in the Church didn't start with the bishops, the priests, or the laity. It started with the man is charge. All of the Popes from John XXIII to the present one had the power to stop the rot, but they choosed not to do it. They issued encyclicals on pressing matters, but refused to back them up with force or authority. Many of the bishops and priests knew this, and openly ignored and rebelled against an willingly impotent Papacy. These jokers aren't going to change until the Pope does. Until Michael Voris, other Catholic clergy and laity, start noticing and doing something about the rotting head, don't expect the rest of the body to get any better.

JB said...


Cardinals will be pitted against cardinals, bishops against bishops.... we can see the exact words of Akita playing out in front of our eyes.

If there is any legitimization of communion for the divorced and remarried, the entire edifice of Catholic teaching on human sexuality will collapse. One cardinal whose name escapes me (Caffara?) just pointed this out, in opposition to what Cardinal Kasper seems to be proposing as an "idea." If sex can be had outside an indissoluble marriage bond, then it can be had anywhere.

I think Voris has taken quite the curious turn here, the Catechism itself speaks of the laity's obligation to speak out - - as does the august Vatican II itself, which refers to us as the People of God.

JB said...


From Lumen Gentium.... Unless I'm very wrong, Catholics cannot be wrong in proclaiming that divorce and remarriage are inconsistent with a belief in the indissolubility of marriage proclaimed by Christ himself. We are to be silent in the face of efforts to change this? I don't think so.


12. The holy people of God shares also in Christ's prophetic office; it spreads abroad a living witness to Him, especially by means of a life of faith and charity and by offering to God a sacrifice of praise, the tribute of lips which give praise to His name.(110) The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One,(111) cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples' supernatural discernment in matters of faith when "from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful" (8*) they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God.(112) Through it, the people of God adheres unwaveringly to the faith given once and for all to the saints,(113) penetrates it more deeply with right thinking, and applies it more fully in its life.

TTC said...

JB,

Since 'civil unions' have already been 'studied', conclusions reached and doctrine and instructions memorialized in our Catechism, thousands of documents written by 2000 years of Saints and Popes, what is the Pope's purpose in pretending the 'study' and documents do not exist and he has choose a dissenting bishop (Kasper) to find new conclusions?

We have all seen this show before and we know where it has always ended.

He has not, as of yet, given any indication his intentions are to lead to the truth and instructions that sanctify and save souls.

It has already collapsed under his show, both in the Church and in the culture.

JB said...

TTC, point well taken. He is allowing a Pandora's Box to be opened. And I agree with Father Harrison that the enemy of the human race (as Saint Pius X put it) is going to try and use this "synodal" event to further wreck the Church.

Anonymous said...

"I think Voris has taken quite the curious turn here, the Catechism itself speaks of the laity's obligation to speak out - - as does the august Vatican II itself, which refers to us as the People of God."

Perhaps somebody in the hierarchy is intimidating Voris, privately?