THE FALSE PROPHETISM OF WORLDLY CLERGY
Editorial: Radicati nella fede, November 2014
Newsletter of the Catholic community of
Vocogno, Diocese of Novara, Italy
A war breaks out somewhere in the world and the clergy
of all levels, voice their solidarity with the victims and the population hit
by it. There is a flood or an
earthquake, and nearness in prayer is communicated coupled with a lecture to
the civil authorities who were incapable of warding off the disaster or scarce
in their aid after the fact.
We are in an economic crisis and this worldly clergy
attempts to teach the economist what they need
to do by foisting their own “recipe” onto the State and the
industrialists, reminding them of the rights of the workers.
By now we are used to these inevitable, humdrum
ecclesiastical bulletins begotten by the likewise inevitable meetings of the
ecclesiastical conferences.
Yet is all of this actually the task of the Catholic
priesthood? And if it is in some
measure, is that all there is to his mission?
Despite all this talk of a prophetic Church, true
prophecy is missing: the true, Catholic type of prophecy according to God. What is missing is the call to return to God.
[From worldly clergy] you won’t hear this call for a
return to God! You won’t hear these words anymore that resounded faithfully at
all times and seasons of the Christian life and particularly in moments of
hardship and affliction: “Dear brothers and sisters, this suffering, this
calamity, this crisis is a call for us to return to God, so that nothing worse
happens to us!”
From [too many] pulpits today there is no clear voice
raised; that God speaks to us through
pain, not only of His tenderness, but
also of our conversion. “Brothers and sisters, it is because we have abandoned
the Lord that this has fallen upon us; let’s do penance and turn once more to
His commandments.”
Some will say that this is spiritual terrorism, that
also the just man suffers and the Cross is not always a consequence of personal
sin. This
is true.
Yes, it is true, but the just man called to carry a
heavy Cross does so in reparation for the sin of all the people, and so this
takes nothing away from the truth that calamities are connected to sin, but
rather confirms it.
A text from the great Dominican P. Calmel (1914-1975)
is very eloquent in this regard. Written in 1968 (“le pretre et la révolution,
1914-1968”, Itineraire n. 127, November 1968, p. 37), he exposes from
the Christian viewpoint of human history, the changes made by worldly clergy. A worldly clergy which already in the first
half of the 20th century had
passed to a false prophetism and
a false reading of reality:
“The secular clergy made changes mostly regarding perpetual peace,
disarmament and social progress”, they praised the soldiers who had died at the front (it was at the end of
the First World War), for “ the human
emancipation according to the declaration of human rights”. Instead of speaking of God to a world
suffering as a result of the war, this clergy worked like the socialists so
that the dead from the Great War would be useful to human progress; instead of
eternal salvation, this clergy concerned
itself with human rights!
Let’s return to P. Calmel: “…the priests with a taste for worldly things gradually ended up merging
the supernatural Messianism of the Kingdom, which is not of this world, with
the revolutionary Messianism of masonry and communism. These priests entered into ‘the game of Caesar’,
which, after the 1789 revolution, aspired more than ever to substitute God,
thus eliminating original sin and its consequences…” This is terrible as it implies the
disappearance of the supernatural life i.e. the Kingdom not of this world and
eternal life itself. These priests with a love for the world became priests of
Naturalism, the religion that never mentions sin and grace. They concerned
themselves about the rights of man; not
that men be saved from Hell and after living a Christian life, may reach
Heaven. The Kingdom of God had disappeared to make room for the kingdom of the
United Nations. Calmel again: “The
priests with a taste for revolution have been teaching insistently for more
than 20 years that the peace of Christ is mixed up with the politics of the
United Nations and is epitomized in it.”
“The priest with a taste for
the world i.e. the “worldly” priest […] has transformed himself and turned into
the man of earthly Messianism [..] he makes himself an accomplice of modern Caesar.”
Some will say that today the Church has less
propensity for things social and the temptations of reading Marxist history; that this was the danger for priests in the
‘70’s , tempted to dialogue with the Marxists. In a certain sense, this is
true, Communism has collapsed and everyone has become a little bit more
“bourgeois”. But the revolution of the
‘70s i.e. solidarity with the workers, has been substituted by the bourgeois
revolution of solidarity with its struggles for individual rights: the rights
of de facto couples, homosexuals,
divorced and remarried who want Holy Communion; free contraception, free
adoption…and so on and so forth. It’s
always the same Revolution dictated by Masonic secularism, whether it’s of the
left or the right, is of little consequence.
It’s always under the banner of the rights of man. Regarding the problem of God and eternal life
there isn’t even a trace!
“More than a million French Christian youth give their lives from 1914 to 1918. And the priests according to worldly
thinking - the dull-witted witnesses of this
unprecedented massacre - are not able to
grasp the significance, that if we do not return to God even worse waves await us…”
“If we do not
return to God” …the worldly priests will never say this. They will never say it
because they have espoused the old socialist revolutions or the new bourgeois,
liberal ones.
Many priests, disciples of these “dull-witted
witnesses” have made it to the top of the highest levels in the hierarchy. You
hear them saying these things about suffering, calamities, wars and homicides
but they never mention the need to return to God. They express their
solidarity, drearily and inanely and the world pretends to listen to these
appeals that conform to the usual pre-confectioned script.
The Truth is the only thing that would possibly
astound.
If a priest, from even the humblest village in the
world, stood up and said: “Brothers, if we don’t return to God, something worse
will befall us”, then the world might truly be silent and think upon it.
[Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana]
