20 May 2021

More on the Abortive Pastoral. HELP!!

You can help me! You do so, so often! But this particular appeal is mainly to Britons.

It will be interesting to know if in any dioceses of England, Wales, and Scotland the Abortive Pastoral is ordered to be read. I would be enormously grateful if you could let me know what happens in your experience.

I would also be interested if some local ordinaries sit on the fence by saying that the text 'may be used'' ... or words to that effect, rather than ordering it to be read in all churches.

If you do not wish me to enable your comment, but are simply (very graciously) sending me this information, please begin your comment with PRIVATE in capital letters. When I have read it, I will then delete it..

Out of interest, I have just reread the Encyclical letter Dominum et Vivificantem of Pope S John Paul II. I've got quite a collection of old CTS editions of Papal documents in translation, pre-Internet and dating from those golden days when I eagerly read such things with confidence that they would instruct and inform me.

The rereading impresses me. Why not reread it yourselves? The Encyclical is ... as you will expect ... a very great deal shorter than the documents which emerge from the present very generous papal regime. And it is pervaded by Holy Scripture and the Fathers in a way quite foreign to Bergoglianist documents. Forget the ultratraddies who denigrate JP2. He had his failings, but ...

Dunno if the CTS still stocks such things, or whether exelthen dogma para HQ to "pulp all the old rubbish", but I imagine that this Encyclical is in any case still available on the Internet. It is a significant Magisterial document for the Great Jubilee which inaugurated this Christian millennium. Hence its status, in the mind of the Holy Pontiff whose authority it bears, must be other than transient.

The main point I wish to make is that it contains none of the stuff we get in the Abortive PL. It is all about God and the Trinity and Holy Scripture ... as things sometimes were in those far-off times. There is a place (paragraph 64) where it could have nodded towards the 'ecological' preoccupations of PF and his associates, but it signally fails to do so. 

And this is the Dog which Failed to Bark in the Night.

What does all this mean? That a major pontifical instrument issued to the Universal Church for Pentecost 1986, is now, in the eyes of some of the present bishops, Old Mitre. It's not what the Boss in Rome wants. So we dump it. And, instead, we address our flocks with the latest fashionable babble of the World. Because he has bought into it.

Catholic teaching, apparently, does not nowadays 'develop'. Plain Rupture is the prescribed order of the day, as we dump the teaching of three or four decades ago ... and three or four centuries  ago. And the newly confected  dogmas of 2021 take its place.

As one Bergoglianist extremist (Scicluna) put it: "Whoever wishes to discover what Jesus wants from him, he must ask the pope, this pope. not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that. This present pope."

That things should come to such an explicit and unrebuked apostasy from Catholic Tradition!

Thirty or forty years from now, much the same thing will presumably take place. The logorrhoeic prolixities of PF will in their turn be discarded with contempt and ridicule. ("Did you say 'pope Francis'? Dear old 'Amazonian' Bergoglio?!? Ho Ho Ho! Pass the bottle!"). And justly and inevitably so: no pope has any more authority than any other pope (or any less). By his implicit denigration of the Magisterium of his predecessors, PF has sawn through the branch of the tree upon which he is (or was, just a moment ago) himself sitting.

And a further point. The teaching of S John Paul, in Dominum et Vivificantem, not only misses an opportunity to hint at Bergoglianism: it undercuts it and, in advance, very effectively contradicts it. For instance:.

Bergoglianism loves to avoid hard or 'offensive' language. Amoris laetitia declined to use the word 'Adultery' although an important purpose of that document was to facilitate and to detoxify the notion of Adultery. Currently, Bergoglianist ideologues are lecturing us on the need to rid the Catechism of terminology such as "disordered". A CDF declaration that the Church cannot "bless Sin", recently caused noisy outrage among those who are happiest when their outrage is noisiest. 

But the Polish Pope devoted much of his encyclical to talking about Sin. The Holy Spirit whom the Lord promises will convince, convict, the world of Sin. And "A result of an upright conscience is, first of all, to call good and evil by their proper names [JP2 italics]." The unforgivable "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" is "the radical refusal to be converted". And JP2 even dared to quote one of those very unBergoglian NT lists of sins which disqualify from the kingdom: "fornication, impurity, licentiousness ... [porneia; akatharsia; aselgeia ...]".

I do not think that a JP2 redivivus would be persona grata among the precious post-Catholic functionaries who tremble before PF's tantrums in the baroque and deferential Court at the Santa Marta.

And JP2 might even prove a rather awkward participant in the more genteel deliberations of the CBCEW. 

But he's dead.

So that's all right, then. 


10 comments:

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Father. It was Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope John Paul's choice to head the CDF, who initiated this subversive ideology when in reference to earlier Papal Encyclicals (The Nature and Mission of Theology)he claimed “perhaps for the first time” the Church is now stating that there are magisterial decisions which cannot be the final word on a given matter as such but, despite the permanent value of their principles, are chiefly also a signal for pastoral prudence, a sort of provisional policy.

How could Pope John Paul I and Cardinal Ratzinger not see that such a claim is essentially the work of a sapper vis a vis the Magisterium?

They can drop the teachings of former Popes but nobody could use that precedent to abandon anything in his encyclicals as being of pastoral prudence or some provisional policy no longer apt?

Sue Sims said...

Definitely not ordered to be read in our diocese. But then, this is the diocese overseen by the Footnoting Bishop of your previous post, so it's about as likely as Pope Francis celebrating an Ordinariate Mass in St Agatha's, Portsmouth.

E sapelion said...

I do not anticipate hearing this 'pastoral'. Just as I have not heard anything from the parish about the 'Novena on the Care of Creation' we were offered by some group/committee for our use between Ascension and Pentecost

Dave K said...

From this week's London Oratory newsletter on their website for Pentecost Sunday:

PASTORAL LETTER
There is a Pastoral Letter from our Cardinal-Archbishop for Pentecost about our care for the created world. The letter addresses this very public theme from the perspective of the Catholic faith. Please take a copy of the letter, which will be available at the back of the church. On Sunday the letter will also be published on the diocesan website and the social media.

Will it be read from the pulpit? This suggests that it will not, merely available in print at the back of the church.

PM said...

An earlier monument to the same tradition is the encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Divinum Illud Munus, by Leo XIII of happy memory. Besides its depth and authority, it would be remarkable by today's standards for its brevity: it is commendably short and to the point.

Simon Cotton said...

Here in the Archdiocese of Birmingham, the weekly newsletter of my parish refers to the Pastoral Letter, saying that copies are available at the back of the church, as indeed there are.

Compton Pauncefoot said...

I heard the Pastoral Letter read out in a church in Wiltshire today. I was constantly trying to make a connection between the torrent of clichés it contained - I recall the dreaded phrase 'Build Back Better' - and the Feast of Pentecost. But in the end I gave up.
The priest retrieved the situation somewhat by delivering an excellent short homily during his parish announcements at the end of Mass.

Bud said...

Checked two parishes in Northampton Diocese. One no mention of PL other did not read it out but the full letter is highlighted in the online newsletter.

E sapelion said...

It was read in our church, after a brief reference to the Sequence having been composed by Stephen Langton. It was read without comment beyond 'There is a pastoral letter ', just the text as published, so no attribution, or the usual date and signature.
Liverpool's Archdiocesan 'Home Page' invites us to :-
"Read, listen, download
Archbishop Malcolm's
Pastoral Letter
for Pentecost Sunday
23 May 2021" (sic)
from there
" Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales
Pastoral Letter for Pentecost 2021
Listen to or download the Pastoral Letter
'Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, ... '" (sic)
At the beginning many people seemed to be paying attention, I lost focus in the third paragraph, after 'enormity' ..

Chrysologos said...

The Scottish bishops have produced their own letter. Here is the link:

https://www.bcos.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Pastoral%20Letter%20on%20Care%20of%20Creation%20Pentecost%20Sunday%202021.pdf

It has footnotes; some of which do not cite Pope Francis. In many a place it raises an eyebrow, beginning with the opening statement, ‘God’s creation is a great gift to all humanity.’ I suspect many might say, ‘thanks but no thanks’ for the great gift of, for example, coronavirus. I could go on ….

Appropriately the letter appears on the Aberdeen diocesan website; Bp Hugh is the chairman of the Scottish Bishops’ Conference. However, none of four parishes I sampled in the diocese mentioned the letter either at Mass or in the parish Newsletter.