Rorate Caeli

The Council and the Eclipse of God by Don Pietro Leone - CHAPTER 11 (part 2) 'The Effects of Council Teaching'

 

‘The evil of our day is less a pandemic than a pandemonium.'

 

5.    Man in his Choice of Life

 

We here consider, as we have done above:

 

a)     Marriage;

b)    The Priesthood;

c)     The Religious Life.

 

a)      Marriage

 

 



We have shown above how the Council’s eroticism was to influence the subsequent Magisterium:  Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI, the new rite of marriage, Familiaris Consortio and the ‘Theology of the Body’ of Pope John Paul II, Canon law, the New Catechism, and finally Amoris Laetitia of Pope Francis, where ‘love’ is finally given priority over procreation, pre-marital ‘love’ and the Gender ‘theory’ are lauded, adulterous liaisons are accepted, and adulterers permitted to receive sacrilegious Communion [1]. As we said above, to give priority to ‘love’ is effectively to divinize it, a conceit which was later to be underpinned in theory by ‘Theology of the Body’.

 

As to contraception in particular, Humanae Vitae was to re-inforce the perennial Catholic teaching as to its intrinsic evil, although the Council’s spirit of liberalism manifest in ambiguous language and in the failure to condemn it explicitly, and in eroticism was to inform the teaching of the clergy to the present day. Likewise the Council’s innovative advocacy of small families, of the equality of the spouses and of the putative need for ‘sex education’ has likewise been taken up and insisted upon by the subsequent Magisterium.  

 

The Council’s failure explicitly to condemn either contraception (although later corrected in Humanae Vitae) or, more generally, the burgeoning impurity of the 1960’s, certainly opened the floodgates to the depravity of the modern world. Had the Council spoken out clearly on these issues, what light and what Graces would not have inundated the World? - even to the extent of preventing the ‘Revolution of the 1960’s’.

 

Man’s mind is darkened; his will is diverted from the love of the Creator to the love of the creature; it is diverted from the greatest purely human love, that of marriage, to unnatural practices (including contraception) and to the killing, perversion [2], and consumption [3] of his own children, so that the primary finality of marriage, the conservation of the human race, is no longer striven for by raising children in a family, but by devouring them. The evil of our day is less a pandemic than a pandemonium [4].

 

b)       The Priesthood

 


The same secular vision of the priesthood that was envisaged by the Council has become the norm in years succeeding it: his Christological identity and his Eucharistic orientation have been silenced in favor of a secularized, protestantized ideal of a lay and non-celibate president and teacher; the secular vision of his formation envisaged by the Council has been imposed on the seminaries: with their openness to the World, with their philosophical and theological relativism, and with their psychologism.

 

'I saw you turn into the street like a light' said the penitent 



We have seen many priests abandon the priestly state of life in favor of marriage in these years; we have seen many a traditional seminarian expelled from the seminary or contaminated by remaining in it; and many a vocation destroyed by Freudian psychology. We have seen the admission of Anglican married clergy to the priesthood without requiring perfect chastity of them, a movement to promote married clergy, as well as ‘women deacons and priests’; and lastly the tendency of priests to abandon clerical dress - an error not only disciplinary, moral [5], but also theological, since the clergy belongs to the Church Visible.

 

c)     The Religious Life




The provisions for the ‘up-to-date renewal’ of religious life have been applied subsequent to the Council in all their rigor: the result has been less a renewal than a decimation. Between 1966 and 1976 the total number of nuns declined by 50,000 [6]; between 1976 and 2002 by approximately the same figure [7].

 

Under the Franciscan Pontificate one of the most vital, Catholic, and admirable of all the new religious foundations, the ‘Franciscans of the Immaculate’, encompassing both friars and nuns, was suppressed or disfigured; documents prejudicial to religious life such as Cor Orans were issued by the Vatican; a period of suppression was inaugurated for convents viewed as obsolescent [8] and a subsequent process of promiscuous amalgamation for surviving religious irrespective of the orders to which they belonged. It is worth noting that it was a similar process with which Cardinal Wolsey initiated the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ under King Henry VIII.

 

We have equally witnessed an enormous decline in vocations to the priesthood and in commitment to sacramental marriage [9]. This whole decline has of course been augmented by the Council's promotion of the small family. Mais que voulez-vous? [10] If the teaching of modern Churchmen on marriage, priesthood,  and the Religious Life is no longer authentic, how can you expect young people to embrace them?

 



[1] Amoris Laetitia, 300 with note 336; 298 with note 329. See The Church and Asmodeus, Rorate Caeli. In that essay we also show the deceit of the encyclical’s author in pretending in manipulated footnotes that the heterodox, novel teaching is orthodox and traditional. We have seen similar manipulations of footnotes in regard to Religious Liberty ch.4 III (a). 

[2] by current educational programs

[3] by ‘the vaccine’

[4] or plandemonium. We shall return to such themes in our more general treatment of impurity in B 3 (b) i.

[5] the author, by wearing traditional clerical dress in public, has given scandal to the clergy but consolation to the faithful. It enabled him, on a number of occasions, to hear confessions which would not otherwise have been made, including one of extraordinary gravity: 'I saw you turn into the street like a light', said the penitent.

[6] MD pjc, Appendix 8

[7] Infiltration op.cit. p.163 which provides other comparable statistics for those interested in pursuing further this unhappy enquiry.

[8] the author knows one such community in Italy which survived the persecution. He can only describe its members as white lilies, placed on their entry into the convent in a vase of stagnant conciliar water, who, having miraculously survived, were then threatened to be thrown out onto the street to be trampled underfoot by passers-by. They survived this latter destiny only due to the heroic determination of their Mother Superior to save them from an expulsion which she perceived would incur their certain death

[9] see Infiltration op.cit.

[10] What do you expect?