God be praised for our Anglo-Saxon instinct for juridical precision and limitation.
In the Church of England, the oath of canonical obedience is restricted to "all things lawful and honest".
And, if a man swears allegiance to a monarch, that oath refers to the monarch's lawful successors. We are not culturally inclined to swear unlimited oaths structured around the cult of an individual. This ... unlike many of our instincts ... is laudable.
Compare with it the Nazi Oath to Hitler. "I swear to Thee, Adolph Hitler ... obedience unto death ...".
That oath, BTW, referred to Herr Hitler as "the Leader": just as today's Manila formula refers to PF.
The Manila dogma requires those subscribing, to undertake: "To you Pope Francis we pledge our undying loyalty and filial veneration, now and forever".
Really? "Forever"? If PF lives and reigns, as we hope, for another 35 years, nevertheless there will some day be another, different, pope. Might not he or she expect to receive some sort of respect from the Catholics of his or her own time? What is he/she going to make of it if we all run around in circles protesting our undying loyalty to his or her predecessor "forever"?
"Forever" seems to me an awfully, terribly, long time.
When we have departed this earthly life, will it be proper for us to explain to the Almighty that our obedience to Him is "forever" conditioned and limited by our "loyalty and veneration" for Pope Francis I?
(Paragraph 17 of Pius XI's Encyclical Mit Brennende Sorge is important and illuminating here.)
The cult of an Individual, whether in Church or in State, is contrary to every sound Christian instinct. Well, actually, to every sound human instinct.
In the collection Defending the Faith Against Present Heresies (Arouca eds Lamont and Pierantoni pp 199 ff) I brought together a number of loci where extreme hyperpapalism has seduced various clerical personages into attributing something like divinity to PF. The Manila vows represent another and very extreme example of this grossly heterodox malaise.
The personalised vows to Bergoglio currently demanded by bishops in the Philippines, not least when there is attributed to PF such a status as the "Very Personification of the Spirit of Vatican II", represent a dreadful corruption of Catholicism; a corruption which I personally repudiate.
This Manila stuff is either Blasphemy or it is meaningless verbose Bilge. Neither seems to me to constitute an appropriate interpolation into Holy Mass after the Creed.
Yes; I know we can laugh, as a number of bloggers are pointing out. Indeed, laughter is often the best response to the terrible perversion of Catholicism being thrust (by corrupted minds including the Nuncio) upon the poor peoples of the Philippines.
But all this is much worse than just a big bad joke by risible out-of-control Latinos.
Corruptio optimi pessima.
LITURGICAL NOTES
(1) The General Instruction of the (Novus Ordo) Missal makes clear that the Roman Canon should have been used (para 365) because Ss Peter and Paul are mentioned in it. If the purpose of the Church of Manila was to 'make room' for the Fidelity to Francis business by using a short Eucharistic Prayer, this would seem to me an obvious abuse.
(2) If the Roman Canon was used, and it was still felt that the rite needed to be lengthened, the obvious solution would be to incorporate the Athanasian Creed; which has three advantages: (a) as S John Henry Newman pointed out, it is extraordinarily beautiful; (b) it comes from deep within the ancient Memory of the Latin Churches, not being an ad hoc formula concocted recently; and (c) it is not crammed chokka with absurdities.
7 comments:
Glorious takedown!
Perhaps Pope Francis is immortal. If not, does this imply that the 'Spirit of Vatican II' shall die with him?
The tragedy is that Pope Francis really does seem to be the personification of the 'spirit' of Vatican II.
Yes, EP2 was used, so no surprise there...
I donot quite understand, whether this is satire, or a fact: have the Catholic Hiersrvhy indeed inserted an Osth of Loyalty to Bergoglio into the Mass, right after the Creed? I hope that this is some kind of joke, for I donot know how much more hiersrchical blasphemy and silliness Catholics, including myself, can take.
I think this is what our Lord was warning against when He said "call no man father." Not the old canard against calling priests Father So-and-so, but rather this saccharine, sentimental, canonization of the living.
This must be a parody, one hopes. Benedict XVI of happy memory would have cringed at the thought of something similar for him. It is redolent of the cult of Mao and Xi in China.
For a little light relief, we can recall that wonderful barb in The Economist when Chairman XI's regime announced that Handel's Messiah could no longer be performed in the Communist workers' and peasants' paradise. What, asked The Economist, if they changed the words to 'Xi shall reign for ever and ever'?
And they aren't even fair enough to have a "do you pledge - I do" structure, which would give a bystander the chance to shouting (or whispering) "no!" in stead of "I do".
In stead, they have the chuzpah of using "Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat" as a "yes" when it in itself would much more be a "no", and perhaps even intended by the one or the other member of the congregation to mean "no, I am following Christ, and the submission to Pope Francis is that to Christ's Vicar and nothing apart from and beyond that"...
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