GAG THEM

It is important that the recent paper by Gerhard, Cardinal Mueller, should be read and taken seriously. He wrote it to be read during the recent Consistory, but ...surprise, surprise ... guess what ... there just wasn't time for it.

Great credit to Lifesitenews for making it available; even greater credit is due to his Eminence for yet another distinguished gift to the Universal Church.

PARRHESIA

First ... a bit of background. At the start of this pontificate, PF thought that the bishops, for the most part, were behind him and his policies. They just needed to be set free to say what they thought, and then a great wave of joyous Bergoglianity would sweep throughout the Church. So PF made a lot of noise about Parrhesia - the right of free people, without fear, to express their views.

As one of his Argie fixers put it, "he means Mueller can't come after us."

SHUT THEIR MOUTHS

But the bishops, as a body, were woefully unwilling to play the role mapped out for them by the Peronist Pope. Promptly, his strategy changed. The Bergoglian policy now became that of suppressing freedom of speech among the Cardinals and Bishops. Accordingly, PF saw to it that the Cardinals were no longer allowed the liberty, when they met, to discuss matters among themselves. Since they couldn't be relied on to come up with the 'right' answers ... Gag Them.

WOMEN

PF did get one thing straight ... women cannot validly receive the Sacrament of Holy Order. So he sought a way round this. And what he came up with was the opening out of certain important roles ... not least in the Roman Curia ... to lay people. That is what lies behind the Bergoglian 'reorganisation' of the Curia. Especially the clever idea of confusing the sacramental structure of the Church with the administrative authority of the Papacy.

MASCALL and the ANGLICANS

As long ago as 1958, the great Anglican Catholic theologian the Reverend Professor Doctor Eric Mascall, Oratory of the Good Shepherd, of this University, had identified precisely this dodge as part of the temptation to corruption of a tyrannical papacy. In his The Recovery of Unity, he wrote at length about "the power of the Pope to overrule by his administrative authority the sacramental structure of the Church". He criticised this "tendency ... to submerge the sacramental aspect of the Catholic Church beneath the administrative and juridical, a tendency which is inevitable if the absolute dominion of the papacy  over the episcopate is to be maintained."

PROVIDENCE

I wonder why, in the wise designs of Providence, we were invited to bring all our baggage into the Catholic Church, just a few short years before Bergoglianity. Any ideas?