Papal theologian warns of the coming violence...

Father Wojciech Giertych, O.P., papal theologian, is warning of the coming violence which will result from the contraceptive/pro-abortion mentality which is so deeply rooted in our culture.  See here:

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/on-contraception-and-the-coming-violence-interview-with-popes-personal-theo


Today there is a demand for sex without love, for a licentiousness in sex which has wrought a heartless society in which individuals do not care for anyone but themselves. The fruit of this demonic theology is the slaughter through abortion and euthanasia of human beings created in the Imago Dei. It is a theology of violence which is rooted in hatred of truth. For at the heart of immorality is falsity, the hatred of truth. Fr. Vincent P. Miceli, in an essay entitled "The Taproot of Violence," explains:


"...violence entered creation from the rebellion of Lucifer. This rebellion arose from the heart of pride. But the sin of pride is the offspring of the vice known as hatred of truth. Hatred of truth is the result of the creature's attempt to rearrange God's hierarchy of beings and values into an order which the creature prefers to the plan of God. This attempt immediately produces the violence of disorder, the chaos of falsity and immorality. For hatred of truth is really hatred of God who creates all things wisely and governs them lovingly. Lucifer, the Morning Star, was instantly deformed into the Prince of Darkness because he attempted to live a lie. He wanted to dethrone God and become God himself..."

We live in an environment where there is a "violence of disorder" because we have abandoned truth. And hatred of truth leads to violence. It is the very root of violence. Jesus said to the Pharisees, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own account, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me." (John 8: 42-45).

It is rejection of truth which leads to violence. And so we read in verse 59 of the same Chapter, "So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple." If there is exaggerated rhetoric and violence across our society, it is because many have rejected God's created order. But there is a consequence to this rejection of truth.

As Dorothy Sayers reminded us, if we will not have Christ, we will have chaos. See here: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0138.html




 

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The Worcester Diocese should have held onto this faithful priest

Some years ago, a faithful and dedicated priest decided to leave the Diocese of Worcester and become a Chaplain for the United States Army.  During a conversation back in 2000, this priest-friend told me that he had had enough of the nonsense within the diocese.  This was after he presided over a graveside service for my father.

This same faithful priest has a letter in this week's "Catholic" [when they feel like it] Free Press.  As usual, it is an excellent letter.  But then, this priest reads the life of Jesus Christ.  The letter is entitled  "Choose life and love, not moral decay."  Fr. Anthony Kazarnowicz writes:


"According to a survey (CFP, June 1), 83% of Catholics consider it 'morally acceptable' to use contraceptives to prevent pregnancy, 'despite church teachings to the contrary.'  The Church teaches that God designed sex for bonding between a husband and wife and for procreation.  In deciding for ourselves that it is 'morally acceptable' to unnaturally close sex to life, we have made ourselves (not God, or those whom Jesus placed in authority over us) the final arbiters of what is good and evil.  It's Satan's temptation to Adam and Eve all over again.

Next, we judged it 'morally acceptable' to separate sex from marriage.  So now, we have rampant sexual promiscuity, cohabitation before marriage and women treated as sex objects.  A pleasure-seeking 'Me Generation' was born.  Dads had live-in girlfriends; moms, live-in boyfriends.

With this denial of moral wrongdoing came the corresponding denial of sin and even a loss of a sense of sin.  Sacramental confessions dwindled.  However, divorces rose to 50% for first marriages, 65% for second marriages and higher for third marriages.

According to the survey, 53% of Catholics favor same-sex 'marriage.'  Heterosexuals who have lifeless sex are not likely to condemn lifeless homosexual sex.  Though homosexual sex is indeed unnatural, there is something even more unnatural - mothers killing their own babies by abortion - 'morally acceptable' to 35% of Catholics.

Before contraception, families were large.  But, children knew right from wrong, were disciplined, respected authority and learned sacrifice.  Families prayed together.  Confessions thrived; divorces were rare.  Most couples waited until marriage before having sex.  Parents accepted children as God's gift. Womanhood and motherhood were cherished.  Vocations to the priesthood and religious life flourished.

Contrasted are a culture of moral decay after contraception and a culture of life and love before contraception.  I pray all Catholics choose life and love."

Sadly, the Worcester Diocese has not always opted for a culture of life and love.  Back in March, I examined an article published in the dissent-friendly diocesan newspaper and written by Father John Catoir, a cleric who also has difficulty telling the truth.  This article was entitled "Birth Control Revisited."  And it was Father Catoir's assertion, while promoting a subjectivist conscience, that the Church's teaching regarding artificial contraception is "beyond the strength" of many Catholics. 

So much for the Worcester Diocese choosing a culture of life and love.

In a talk entitled "Legalism, Moral Truth and Pastoral Practice" given at a 1990 symposium in Philadelphia, Dr. Germain Grisez explained to those present that, "Theologians and pastors who dissent from received Catholic teaching think they are rejecting legalism because they set aside what they think are mere rules in favor of what they feel are more reasonable standards. Their views are thoroughly imbued with legalism, however. For dissenters think of valid moral norms as rules formulated to protect relevant values. Some even make their legalism explicit by denying that there is any necessary connection between moral goodness (which they restrict to the transcendental level of a love with no specific content) and right action (which they isolate at the categorical level of inner-worldly behavior). But whether their legalism is explicit or not, all the dissenters hold that specific moral norms admit exceptions whenever, all things considered, making an exception seems the best - or least bad - thing to do. Most dissenters also think that specific moral norms that were valid in times past can be inappropriate today, and so they regard the Church’s contested moral teachings as outdated rules that the Church should change."


Dr. Grisez reminded his listeners at the Philadelphia symposium, "During the twentieth century, pastoral treatment of repetitious sins through weakness - especially masturbation, homosexual behavior, premarital sex play and contraception within marriage - grew increasingly mild. Pastors correctly recognized that weakness and immaturity can lessen such sins’ malice. Thinking legalistically, they did not pay enough attention to the sins’ inherent badness and harmfulness, and they developed the idea that people can freely choose to do something that they regard as a grave matter without committing a mortal sin. This idea presupposes that in making choices people are not responsible precisely for choosing what they choose. That presupposition makes sense within a legalistic framework, because lawgivers can take into account mitigating factors and limit legal culpability. But it makes no sense for morality correctly understood, because moral responsibility in itself is not something attached to moral acts but simply is moral agents’ self-determination in making free choices.

Repetitious sinners through weakness also were handicapped by their own legalism. Not seeing the inherent badness of their sins, they felt that they were only violating inscrutable rules. When temptation grew strong, they had little motive to resist, especially because they could easily go to confession and have the violation fixed. Beginning on Saturday they were holy; by Friday they were again sinners. This cyclic sanctity robbed many people’s lives of Christian dynamism and contributed to the dry rot in the Church that became manifest in the 1960s, when the waves of sexual permissiveness battered her."


Dr. Grisez went on to explain that, "Pastors free of legalism will teach the faithful how sin makes moral requirements seem to be alien impositions, help them see through this illusion, and encourage them to look forward to and experience the freedom of God’s children, who rejoice in the fruit of the Spirit and no longer experience the constraint of law..They will explain that while one sometimes must choose contrary to positive laws and cannot always meet their requirements, one always can choose in truth and abide in love. They will acknowledge the paradox of freedom - that we seem unable to resist freely choosing to sin - the paradox that Saint Paul neatly formulates: ‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’ (Romans 7:15). But they also will proclaim the liberating power of grace, and help the faithful learn by experience that when one comes to understand the inherent evil of sin and intrinsic beauty of goodness, enjoys the support of a community of faith whose members bear one another’s burdens, begs God for His help, and confidently expects it, then the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead raises him from his sins, and he discovers that with the Spirit’s grace one can consistently resist sin and choose life."

We would have more vocations to the priesthood in the Worcester Diocese if young men witnessed fidelity to the magisterial teaching of the Church from pastors [not to mention the diocesan newspaper] and if orthodox candidates were not excluded because of their commitment to the Church's authentic teaching, especially in the area of sexual morality.

I should know.  I'm one of the excluded.

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Melinda Gates: I'm rich so listen to me!

"The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!

They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
"If you please, Reb Tevye..."
"Pardon me, Reb Tevye..."
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!"

C-FAM is reporting that Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a Catholic, is telling governments to dismiss the controversial link between contraception and population control and explicitly rejects Catholic social teaching along the way...Speaking at a TedxChange conference in Berlin, Germany, Gates argued that contraception has been mistakenly associated with population control, abortion, forced sterilization, and mortal sin and insisted they are 'side issues.'"  See here.

The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), No. 51, says that, "..God, the Lord of life, has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life in a manner which is worthy of man.  Therefore, from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care, while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes."  Abortion is not a "side issue."  It is an unspeakable crime.

The same document teaches that, "...sons of the Church may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law." (No. 51).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing Humanae Vitae, the Encyclical Letter of Pope Paul VI, teaches that, "...'every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible' is intrinsically evil.." (2370).

But Melinda Gates believes that she knows better than the Pastors of the Church.  Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) teaches that the Church's more-than-human authority "is apparent from the living Tradition" and then confirms this by citing a key passage from Dei Verbum, Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, which reminds us that, "the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether in its written form or in that of Tradition, has been entrusted only to those charged with the Church's living Magisterium, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ" (Veritatis Splendor, No. 27, with internal citation from Dei Verbum, No. 10).

Faith demands a renunciation of the sinful self.  Pride must give way in every Catholic's life to humility, which is but a readiness to accept everything good as God's gift and to than Him for it (see Aquinas, S.t., 2-2, q. 161, aa.2-3).  When we allow ourselves to succumb to pride, humility is viewed as a threat to the self.  As a result, sinners who lack faith and believers whose faith has been weakened through habit to sinning will be the more tempted to reject faith in order to avoid self-renunciation - the renunciation of their sinful selves (John 3: 16-21).

Melinda Gates is chained by abundance.  Her material wealth has contributed to a pathological pride.  And this pride has led her to embrace self-assertion.  Dr. Germain Grisez explains that, "Removed from its evangelical context, the Christian insight into each individual's worth is perverted to rationalize sin.  Thus, post-Christian humankind is susceptible to a distinctive moral pathology: egoistic individualism, which exalts the well-being and satisfaction of individuals above every community, even the family.  When colored by this pathology, pride is not expressed exclusively by the quest for positions of social superiority; also, and even more arrogantly, it is seen in every individual's effort to be his or her own sovereign.  Thus, the contemporary attachment to liberty to do as one pleases: 'No one can tell me what to do.'  This attitude leads to rejection of authority generally as well as an unwillingness to accept any social responsibility toward people for whom one has no personal feelings.  Other people are to be ignored except to the extent that they are relevant to one's own purposes or can be made so.  Then they are to be dominated and manipulated, so that at least they will allow one to gain one's ends and at best will serve one's purposes."


The real tragedy is that many will no doubt be confused or led astray by Melinda Gates because, as Topol expressed in song, "When you're rich, they think you really know!"

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"..there is in preparation a true schism which could soon become open and proclaimed.."

Gary Gutting, who teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has declared in the New York Times that the faithful "decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority" and what is moral or immoral.  He writes, "...haven’t the members of the Catholic Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine the teachings of the Church? By no means. There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines. Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone. Most Catholics — meaning, to be more precise, people who were raised Catholic or converted as adults and continue to take church teachings and practices seriously — now reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept. This is above all true in matters of sexual morality, especially birth control, where the majority of Catholics have concluded that the teachings of the bishops do not apply to them. Such “reservations” are an essential constraint on the authority of the bishops.


The bishops and the minority of Catholics who support their full authority have tried to marginalize Catholics who do not accept the bishops as absolute arbiters of doctrine. They speak of 'cafeteria Catholics' or merely 'cultural Catholics,' and imply that the only 'real Catholics' are those who accept their teachings entirely. But this marginalization begs the question I’m raising about the proper source of the judgment that the bishops have divine authority. Since, as I’ve argued, members of the church are themselves this source, it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority. The bishops truly are, as they so often say, 'servants of the servants of the Lord.'

It may be objected that, regardless of what individual Catholics think, the bishops in fact exercise effective control over the church. This is true in many respects, but only to the extent that members of the church accept their authority. Stalin’s alleged query about papal authority ('How many divisions does the Pope have?') expresses more than just cynical realpolitik. The authority of the Catholic bishops is enforceable morally but not militarily or politically. It resides entirely in the fact that people freely accept it." (See here).

In his Encyclical Letter Humanum Genus (on Freemasonry), Pope Leo XIII warned that: "Wickedly, also, but at the same time quite consistently, do those act who do away with the expectation of the joys of heaven, and bring down all happiness to the level of mortality, and, as it were, sink it in the earth. Of what We have said the following fact, astonishing not so much in itself as in its open expression, may serve as a confirmation. For, since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and proposed that, artfully and of set purpose, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless license of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring.


What refers to domestic life in the teaching of the naturalists is almost all contained in the following declarations: that marriage belongs to the genus of commercial contracts, which can rightly be revoked by the will of those who made them, and that the civil rulers of the State have power over the matrimonial bond; that in the education of youth nothing is to be taught in the matter of religion as of certain and fixed opinion; and each one must be left at liberty to follow, when he comes of age, whatever he may prefer. To these things the Freemasons fully assent; and not only assent, but have long endeavoured to make them into a law and institution. For in many countries, and those nominally Catholic, it is enacted that no marriages shall be considered lawful except those contracted by the civil rite; in other places the law permits divorce; and in others every effort is used to make it lawful as soon as may be. Thus, the time is quickly coming when marriages will be turned into another kind of contract-that is into changeable and uncertain unions which fancy may join together, and which the same when changed may disunite....With the greatest unanimity the sect of the Freemasons also endeavours to take to itself the education of youth. They think that they can easily mold to their opinions that soft and pliant age, and bend it whither they will; and that nothing can be more fitted than this to enable them to bring up the youth of the State after their own plan. Therefore, in the education and instruction of children they allow no share, either of teaching or of discipline, to the ministers of the Church; and in many places they have procured that the education of youth shall be exclusively in the hands of laymen, and that nothing which treats of the most important and most holy duties of men to God shall be introduced into the instructions on morals.

What, therefore, sect of the Freemasons is, and what course it pursues, appears sufficiently from the summary We have briefly given. Their chief dogmas are so greatly and manifestly at variance with reason that nothing can be more perverse. To wish to destroy the religion and the Church which God Himself has established, and whose perpetuity He insures by His protection, and to bring back after a lapse of eighteen centuries the manners and customs of the pagans, is signal folly and audacious impiety. Neither is it less horrible nor more tolerable that they should repudiate the benefits which Jesus Christ so mercifully obtained, not only for individuals, but also for the family and for civil society, benefits which, even according to the judgment and testimony of enemies of Christianity, are very great. In this insane and wicked endeavor we may almost see the implacable hatred and spirit of revenge with which Satan himself is inflamed against Jesus Christ.


So also the studious endeavour of the Freemasons to destroy the chief foundations of justice and honesty, and to co-operate with those who would wish, as if they were mere animals, to do what they please, tends only to the ignominious and disgraceful ruin of the human race. The evil, too, is increased by the dangers which threaten both domestic and civil society. As We have elsewhere shown, in marriage, according to the belief of almost every nation, there is something sacred and religious; and the law of God has determined that marriages shall not be dissolved. If they are deprived of their sacred character, and made dissoluble, trouble and confusion in the family will be the result, the wife being deprived of her dignity and the children left without protection as to their interests and well being.

To have in public matters no care for religion, and in the arrangement and administration of civil affairs to have no more regard for God than if He did not exist, is a rashness unknown to the very pagans; for in their heart and soul the notion of a divinity and the need of public religion were so firmly fixed that they would have thought it easier to have city without foundation than a city without God. Human society, indeed for which by nature we are formed, has been constituted by God the Author of nature; and from Him, as from their principle and source, flow in all their strength and permanence the countless benefits with which society abounds. As we are each of us admonished by the very voice of nature to worship God in piety and holiness, as the Giver unto us of life and of all that is good therein, so also and for the same reason, nations and States are bound to worship Him; and therefore it is clear that those who would absolve society from all religious duty act not only unjustly but also with ignorance and folly."

Most people today have become so desensitized that they are incapable of seeing just how far this masonic agenda has advanced. The movement to eradicate Christianity is accelerating. Masonry, if it is to prepare the way for the Man of Sin, must concentrate its attacks on the one institution which stands in its way: the Holy Roman Catholic Church. After more than two thousand years of Christian history, the charge levelled against Christians by the pagan historian Tacitus is being revived: The Christians are the enemies of the human race. (Annals, XV, 44).

The new humanitarian religion of Antichrist must institute its own cult, ministers and temples which will be filled with its own faithful who have replaced the hope for Heaven with the idols of humanity, fertility, maternity and virility as surely as the Greco-Romans worshiped the statues of Venus and Apollo. Already we are witnessing an increasing hatred for the Crucifix. As Romano Guardini warned so long ago: "One day the Antichrist will come: a human being who introduces an order of things in which rebellion against God will attain its ultimate power. He will be filled with enlightenment and strength. The ultimate aim of all aims will be to prove that existence witout Christ is possible - nay rather, that Christ is the enemy of existence, which can be fully realized only when all Christian values have been destroyed. His arguments will be so impressive, supported by means of such tremendous power - violent and diplomatic, material and intellectual - that to reject them will result in almost insurmountable scandal, and everyone whose eyes are not opened by grace will be lost. Then it will be clear what the Christian essence really is: that which stems not from the world, but from the heart of God; victory of grace over the world; redemption of the world, for her true essence is not to be found in herself, but in God, from whom she has received it. When God becomes all in all, the world will finally burst into flower."

Our Lady warned us on November 15, 1990 that, "The great trial has arrived for your Church.  Thse errors which have brought people to the loss of the true faith have continued to spread.  Many pastors have been neither attentive nor vigilant and have allowed many rapacious wolves, clothed as lambs, to insinuate themselves into the flock in order to bring disorder and destruction.  How great is your responsibility, O pastors of the holy Church of God!  You continue along the path of division from the Pope and of the rejection of his Magisterium; indeed, in a hidden way, there is in preparation a true schism which could soon become open and proclaimed.  And then, there will remain only a small faithful remnant, over which I will keep watch in the garden of my Immaculate Heart." (To Father Gobbi).

The schism Our Lady spoke of is indeed beginning to emerge.  A new humanitarian religion and a new Future Church are being constructed.  The new religion will be devoid of the supernatural.  It will be man-centered.  Men will decide for themselves what is moral and immoral.  They will build this new Church in their own image and likeness.  Those who still adhere to Christ and His teaching will be declared enemies of progress and the new Moloch State.

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Why should those who produce The Catholic Free Press be surprised that government is now mandating contraception?

In an editorial entitled, "Stop the erosion of religious liberty," The Catholic Free Press, official newspaper of the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts, laments that, "The Obama administration has embarked on a systematic effort to erode religious liberty to the point of non-existence by attempting to restrict it solely to freedom of worship.  Through administrative policies and mandates, religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the United States is under attack, as witnessed by the most recent 'accommodation.'..The Obama administration has been chipping away at the right of religious institutions to abide by their beliefs when those beliefs oppose the secularist agenda, particularly in the arena of morality.  This was clearly evident in the decision not to renew a federal grant by the Department of Health and Human Services to the bishops'  Migration and Refugee Services for its human trafficking program because it would not provide the full range of reproductive services, including abortion and contraception, to human trafficking victims and unaccompanied refugee minors...President Obama made the decision to impose the Department of Health and Human Services' Interim Final Rules on Preventive Services, requiring all private health plans, including those of Catholic hospitals, charities and schools, to provide coverage of prescription contraceptives, including abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization for women.  The so-called "religious employer" exemption that was put forth with these rules is so narrowly defined that it is meaningless.  Unless a religious institution employs and serves only individuals of the same religious tradition, it does not qualify for the exemption.  Therefore, Catholic hospitals and schools who serve people of all faiths, precisely because of their Catholic mission, do not qualify for the exemption.  The recent 'accommodation' offered in response to the outcry that resulted from this mandate, which was unquestionably a direct assault on the Roman Catholic Church's religious liberty, does not lessen the concerns initially raised...We cannot lose sight of the fact that the 'accommodation' does not alter the Obama administration's mandate promoting contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs as a matter of government policy.  It is particularly troubling that the attitude toward human life identifies pregnancy as a disease, posing a threat to one's health.."

How did we get to where we are in the United States?  In the words of Archbishop Charles Chaput, spoken in 2009, "40 years of American Catholic complacency and poor formation are bearing exactly the fruit we should have expected...We can't talk about following St. Paul and converting our culture until we sober up and get honest about what we've allowed ourselves to become. We need to stop lying to each other..."


Once a people appeal to conscience in order to condone sin, it is only a matter of time before such sin is openly mandated.  Long before contraception was being mandated by the government, there were those in the Church - including throughout the Diocese of Worcester - who were unleashing the leaven of infidelity by neglecting to preach against sin or by appealing to a dissenting notion of the primacy of conscience.

Richard Blanchard was documenting this infidelity (within the Worcester Diocese) at the same time I was writing against it in the pages of The Catholic Free Press more than twenty years ago.  For example, in his newsletter "Just The Facts," No. 6, (1993), Richard noted how a Couple-to-Couple team was teaching CCD students preparing for Confirmation in Leominster, Massachusetts (St. Leo's Parish) that, "If your conscience convinces you that birth control is right, even if the Church says its wrong, you can practice birth control and not be sinning."  And then Richard explains: "This has been taught for over 20 years and still is being taught in this diocese [Worcester].  The basis for this teaching is dissent and a dissenting concept of the primacy of conscience which is nothing less than situation ethics."

In the same newsletter, Richard Blanchard noted that, "During the episcopate of Timothy J. Harrington...dissent and disobedience has flourished and taken deep roots....in September of 1984 Sister Anna Kane was appointed Vicar of Religious and Director of the then Office of Women, at the same time she became a member of Bishop Harrington's administrative cabinet.  She became very militant against Humanae Vitae.  Under the administration of Fr. Piermarini, (now Msgr), the religious education department employed Dr. Vincent Forde, Bernard Cooke and Alice Laffey as instructors of the Education in Ministry Program, also known as the Master Catechist Program which has for its goal, master certification for CCD teaching.  All [of these instructors] openly strong advocates against the teaching on birth control in Humanae Vitae."

Within the pages of The Catholic Free Press, Humanae Vitae was openly mocked.  For example, in his "Essay in Theology" column entitled "Humanae Vitae; a troubling silence (CFP, August 13, 1993), dissident priest Father Richard P. McBrien referred to the Church as "a dysfunctional family" because it will not change its teaching on the sinfullness of artificial contraception to appease those who just cannot or will not accept it.


As a result of 40 years of poor catechesis - or none at all - and outright complacency throughout the Catholic Church in America,  too many people today (including sadly, many Catholics) have come to view conscience as a sort of fortress built so as to shelter them from the exacting demands of truth. In the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "In the Psalms we meet from time to time the prayer that God should free man from his hidden sins. The Psalmist sees as his greatest danger the fact that he no longer recognizes them as sins and thus falls into them in apparently good conscience. Not being able to have a guilty conscience is a sickness...And thus one cannot aprove the maxim that everyone may always do what his conscience allows him to do: In that case the person without a conscience would be permitted to do anything. In truth it is his fault that his conscience is so broken that he no longer sees what he as a man should see. In other words, included in the concept of conscience is an obligation, namely, the obligation to care for it, to form it and educate it. Conscience has a right to respect and obedience in the measure in which the person himself respects it and gives it the care which its dignity deserves. The right of conscience is the obligation of the formation of conscience. Just as we try to develop our use of language and we try to rule our use of rules, so must we also seek the true measure of conscience so that finally the inner word of conscience can arrive at its validity.

For us this means that the Church's magisterium bears the responsibility for correct formation. It makes an appeal, one can say, to the inner vibrations its word causes in the process of the maturing of conscience. It is thus an oversimplification to put a statement of the magisterium in opposition to conscience. In such a case I must ask myself much more. What is it in me that contradicts this word of the magisterium? Is it perhaps only my comfort? My obstinacy? Or is it an estrangement through some way of life that allows me something which the magisterium forbids and that appears to me to be better motivated or more suitable simply because society considers it reasonable? It is only in the context of this kind of struggle that the conscience can be trained, and the magisterium has the right to expect that the conscience will be open to it in a manner befitting the seriousness of the matter. If I believe that the Church has its origins in the Lord, then the teaching office in the Church has a right to expect that it, as it authentically develops, will be accepted as a priority factor in the formation of conscience." (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Keynote Address of the Fourth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on "Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts," February 1984).

In the same address, Cardinal Ratzinger explains that, "Conscience is understood by many as a sort of deification of subjectivity, a rock of bronze on which even the magisterium is shattered....Conscience appears finally as subjectivity raised to the ultimate standard."

And subjectivity raised to the ultimate standard gives rise to dictatorship. For, as Pope John Paul II reminded us in Centesimus Annus, "Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person. It requires that the necessary conditions be present for the advancement both of the individual through education and formation in true ideals, and of the 'subjectivity' of society through the creation of structures of participation and shared responsibility. Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and sceptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life. Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends. It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism."

Why should those who produce The Catholic Free Press be surprised that government is now mandating contraception?  The Church in the United States is only reaping what it has sown.

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"...But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

According to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute, only 2 percent of Catholic women, even those who regularly attend Holy Mass, rely on natural family planning.  Some 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods condemned by the Church.  See here.  This is a moral disaster.  And it is a disaster which has largely been brought about by the failure of Roman Catholic priests to preach the Word of God as interpreted by the Church's Magisterium.

Contraception is gravely sinful because it contradicts the divinely intended purpose of marital intercourse, which is to foster procreative love.  Many priests do not preach the Church's teaching on contraception because they believe this grave moral issue is open to change.  But Pope Pius XI has answered these dissidents once and for all:

"Openly departing from the uninterrupted Christian tradition, some recently have judged it possible solemnly to declare another doctrine on this question....The Catholic Church, to whom God has entrusted the defense and purity of morals, standing erect in the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her, in order that she may preserve the chastity of the marital union from being defiled by this foul stain, raises her voice in token of divine Ambassadorship and through Our mouth proclaims anew: Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin." (Casti Conubii, December 31, 1930).

By "grave sin," Pius XI is referring to mortal sin.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, "Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God's law; it turns man away from God, who is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to him." (CCC, 1855).  And further, "To choose deliberately - that is, both knowing it and willing it - something gravely contrary to the divine law and to the ultimate end of man is to commit a mortal sin.  This destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible.  Unrepented, it brings eternal death." (CCC, 1874).

Our Lady told Father Gobbi that many priests have become mute dogs.  They are silent when they should be upholding the faith and striving to save souls.  And because of this, a strong judgment is coming upon them.  Don Bosco was given a prophecy for our time:

"Now Heaven's voice is addressed to the Shepherd of shepherds. You are now in conference with your advisors. The enemy of the good does not stand idle one moment. He studies and practices all his arts against you. He will sow discord among your consultors; he will raise up enemies amongst my children. The powers of the world will belch forth fire, and they would that the words be suffocated in the throats of the custodians of my law. That will not happen, they will do no harm but to themselves. You must hurry. If you cannot untie the knots, cut them. If you find yourself hard pressed, do not give up but continue until the head of the hydra of error is cut off. This stroke will make the world and Hell beneath it tremble, but the world will be safe and all the good will rejoice. Keep your consultors always with you, even if only two. Wherever you go, continue and bring to an end the work entrusted to you. The days fly by, your years will reach the destined number; but the great Queen will ever be your help, as in times past, so in the future She will always be the exceeding great fortress of the Church.

Ah, but you, Italy, land of blessings! Who has steeped you in desolation! Blame not your enemies, but rather your friends. Can you not hear your children asking for the bread of faith and finding only those who smash it to pieces? What shall I do? I shall strike the shepherds, I shall disperse the flock, until those sitting on the throne of Moses search for good pastures and the flock listens attentively and is fed.

Of the flock and over the shepherds My hand will weigh heavy. Famine, pestilence, and war will be such that mothers will have to cry on account of the blood of their sons and of their martyrs dead in a hostile country.

And to you, Rome, what will happen! Ungrateful Rome, effeminate Rome, proud Rome! You have reached such a height that you search no further. You admire nothing else in your Sovereign except luxury, forgetting that you and your glory stands upon Golgotha. Now he is old, defenseless, and despoiled; and yet at his word, the word of one who was in bondage, the whole world trembles.

Rome! To you I will come four times.

The first time, I shall strike your lands and the inhabitants thereof.

The second time, I shall bring the massacre and the slaughter even to your very walls. And will you not yet open your eyes?

I shall come a third time and I shall beat down to the ground your defenses and the defenders, and at the command of the Father, the reign of terror, of dreadful fear, and of desolation shall enter into your city.

But My wise men have now fled and My law is even now trampled underfoot. Therefore I will make a fourth visit. Woe to you if My law shall still be considered as empty words. There will be deceit and falsehood among both the learned and the ignorant. Your blood and that of your children will wash away your stains upon God's law. War, pestilence and famine are the rods to scourge men's pride and wickedness. O wealthy men, where is your glory now, your estates, your palaces? They are the rubble on the highways and byways.

And your priests, why have you not run to "cry between the vestibule and the Altar," begging God to end these scourges? Why have you not, with the shield of faith, gone upon the housetops, into the homes, along the highways and byways, into every accessible corner to carry the seed of My word? Know you that this is the terrible two-edged sword that cuts down My enemies and breaks the Anger of God and of men?"

In our own time, the germ ideas of a one-world religion are already being sowed. And this false humanitarian religion will burst into poisonous flower when enough hearts have grown cold and have abandoned the true religion. As Jane Le Royer explained in prophecy: "When the time of the Antichrist is near, a false religion will appear which will be opposed to the unity of God and His Church. This will cause the greatest schism the world has ever known."  That false religion is even now falling into place.  A false religion where sin will be celebrated.

Related reading here.

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Father J. Bryan Hehir is out of step with the U.S. Bishops...

As reported here, Father J. Bryan Hehir, Secretary for Healthcare and Social Services for the Archdiocese of Boston, has argued that, “We [Catholics] could, on the basis of living in a pluralistic society, remain silent on the contraception question in the public policy area while upholding the Church’s teaching internally.” Father Hehir further argued that such an approach is consistent with Catholic tradition because, “Catholic tradition doesn’t always try to translate internal policy into public policy.”


But the U.S. Bishops aren't advocating such silence.  A new publication from the Bishops urges priests to preach on contraception, sterilization and in vitro fertilization.  In addition, the Bishops are urging priests to stress "God's desire to forgive our sins and renew his grace" and to offer "extra hours of sacramental reconciliation each week."  See here.

Related reading: Father J. Bryan Hehir's corroding and ambiguous pluralism.

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