Fr. Rutler Skewers Cardinal Cupich

How I wish I could write like Fr. Rutler.

Clarity requires effort because it requires honesty, which can be a costly commodity. So George Orwell said: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” Clear expression issues from clear thinking, which in turn requires conforming thought to reality. This was a primary concern of the Master in his holy agony, for he prayed to the Father that his Church never fudge the truth: “Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth” (John 17:17)...

In the Von Hugel lecture, which was recorded and thus cannot be nuanced, Cardinal Cupich said by way of apophasis that “It goes without saying….” and then went on to say that Amoris Laetitia will also mean rejecting “an authoritarian or paternalistic way of dealing with people that lays down the law, that pretends to have all the answers, or easy answers to complex problems, that suggests that general rules will seamlessly bring immediate clarity.” There is clarity again, in all its frustrating opaqueness. And after rejecting authoritarianism and paternalism, the cardinal invoked Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, n. 25 to declare that an innovative interpretation of Amoris Laetitia by the bishops of Buenos Aires, which, by virtue of “the publication in Acta Apostolicae Sedes [sic]” of the papal letter commending it, qualifies as an official Church teaching “which all are obliged to abide by and be in conformity with.”...

This writer writes these words hastily, and knowingly exposes himself to imputations of illogic, irascibility and uncharity. Of only the last I vitally excuse myself, for I mean no irreverence or ill intent as a parish priest commenting on superiors. In the fullness of charity, I suppose that Cardinal Cupich is so occupied with the essential works of mercy incumbent upon a spiritual leader of many, that he may have availed himself of the advice of others inadequate to the task of preparing his attempts at clarification. The one complaint I invoke, albeit a strong one since much of my life’s studies have been nurtured by an intuitive friendship with John Henry Newman, who in an unworthy simile is to me as Philip Neri was to him, is that Cardinal Cupich has cited Newman on conscience to represent the very opposite of what Newman lived and exhausted himself to declare: that conscience must be informed by the Holy Ghost and not left to wander about like a ghost of the subjective human ego, validating uninformed impulses. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman distinguished between the operation of conscience and the exercise of private judgment. Such distinctions may be too delicate for hasty doctors of theology, but they are matters for which men were made martyrs. Errors must not be the template for the formation of consciences innocent and malleable. Chesterton warned: “The more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to children. The smaller our faith in doctrine, the larger is our faith in doctors.”...

Cardinal Cupich likes the term “cherry picking” as a reproach. On February 1 in Holy Name Cathedral, as he had done in 2004 in Rapid City, he faulted Pro-Lifers for “cherry-picking” instead of accepting the entire “seamless garment” theory. In 2017, he spoke against “cherry picking” in immigration issues. But Amoris Laetitia cherry picks in citing only one part of the Summa Theologica II-II, q. 140, in a way that posits the exact opposite of what Aquinas meant, just as Cupich cherry picks Newman on the “aboriginal vicar of Christ.” Cupich cites Gaudium et Spes,” n. 16 which calls conscience “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man … (where) he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.” As Newman was one of the greatest masters of English prose, that kind of lame poesie would have appalled him. It also is sourced from a document parts of which Pope Benedict once called downright Pelagian...

The clarification of doctrine is a risky business. In his novel Loss and Gain, Newman invented a “little, prim, smirking” character, a preacher in Oxford University named the Reverend Dr. Brownside: “As a divine he seemed never to have had any difficulty in any subject; he was so clear or so shallow that he saw to the bottom of all his thoughts: or, since Dr. Johnson tells us that “all shallows are clear,” we may perhaps distinguish him by both epithets.”

Let us be perfectly clear: Dr. Brownside existed only as a sketch on paper, unlike the Bridegroom of the Church who, even without the corroboration of a recording machine, is believed to have “taught as one having authority and not as the scribes.”

Tagged as Amoris Laetitia, Archbishop Blase Cupich, John Henry Newman, Modernism, Progressive Catholics, Seamless Garment

As a Catholic mother, grandmother, the only thing that can be said about the 'cherry picking' of Cardinal Cupich is that he is a liar. Cupich belongs to the effeminate group of dangerous liars in the Episcopal See. Every time I hear or lay eyes on one of them, all I can see is their horns, tail and pitchfork they use to harvest the millions they diabolically disorient.