The Great Division - Papal Intervention on Franciscans of the Immaculate reaches insanity levels: Commissioner warns Italian bishops in person

Tosatti: "Not a very good atmosphere to breathe right now in the Church."

If one wants a reason why Synod special secretary Abp. Bruno Forte, a man currently very close to the Pope and one of his closest advisers, suffered a major defeat in this week's assembly of the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) in the election for Vice-President representing Central Italy (including the Latium...), one must only look at what was going on inside the assembly halls in Assisi, as Marco Tosatti reports below. Despite John Allen's spin to the contrary as not a big deal, the most ultra-liberal of Italian Vaticanists, Marco Politi, was right to identify it as a major message to the Vatican from Italian bishops who are honestly fed up. In an organization so marked by symbols as the Catholic Church, this symbolic message by those bishops in the Bishop of Rome's own country, and own region, was a huge deal. 

There is a general feeling not only of great unease with the direction a strong cabal around the Pope wants to take the Church on moral doctrine, undoing the hard work of Benedict XVI and in particular of John Paul II - a cabal in which Abp. Forte has a strong presence - but also with the heavy-handedness of it all. As Cardinal George is to say in an interview to be released tomorrow, it seems as if there is a desperate rush to implement irreversible change that is hard to understand - George identifies it perhaps with an apocalyptic view of history. (It is not that, though: it is not so hard to understand it when one realizes that ultra-liberal clerics are in a race against time to refashion the Church.)  Many bishops are feeling suffocated by the authoritarian fumes, a weight of unproclaimed persecution that is getting on the nerves not only of conservative prelates, but also of very many very moderate bishops, who form the immense majority of Italian bishops. By the way, a similar interpretation of the election of the United States Conference's four representatives in the 2015 Synod is not off the mark: most U.S. Bishops are also understandably alarmed. Not to mention the Bishops of Poland, in complete resistance to the very notion of the possibility of communion for "remarried" divorcees - the same position of the Bishops of Ghana at the end of their Conference's assembly this week.

Marco Tosatti shows just one example of what was going on in the CEI meeting in Assisi - in the middle of it all, the Papal Commissioner that has been destroying the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate for over a year warning Italian bishops not to welcome those priests desperate to get out of their ordeal:

FFI: "Watch out" for the fugitives

The Traditionalist: The Keeper of the Gifts

by Alessandro Gnocchi

[Italian daily] Il Foglio

November 6, 2014

[Notre-Dame de Chartres Cathedral, June 28, 2014]

***

Traditionalist, yes, but not distant from the world,

as some of us would like to be in times of ruin and destruction.

Talking about the Traditionalist is a little like seventy years ago when Leo Longanesi said “Let’s talk about the elephant.” (1) The intellectual bad habits of Italy straddling between fascism and anti-fascism were always the same; anyway, Italy was a little Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, greatly resembling the Church of today, which anyway, is always a little Italian. At that time, Longanesi made mockery of the quirks and hypocrisies of an intellectual class that liked showing off in exotic discourses and loved “talking about the elephant” instead of the destruction of which it was both the victim and the perpetrator. Similarly, a great show is put on in today’s Church, by those who prefer “talking about the traditionalist”, instead of acknowledging the superficial atmosphere of self-demolition, in which, as the saying goes, “they are both singing and carrying the cross.”(2)

It’s easy to say “traditionalist” with the same levity as Longanesi said: “Gentlemen, let’s talk about the elephant” - said the ineffable gentleman - “it’s the only animal of a certain importance that we can safely talk about without risk, these days.”

Yet the traditionalist, if we really want to know him, is not an animal you talk about resorting to banality. He is not the one reviled in the sermons and tischreden [little speeches at the table] of [the papal household of Casa] Santa Marta; he is not the one of the windbags in the press reviews of the mass-media; he is not the one of the sociology-lovers hanging onto the fleeting instant of doctrines which are in continuous evolution; he is not the one of the bishops who issue pitiful decrees of excommunication against the faithful who dare to attend the Mass of Ages. He is not any of these things and others more besides.

The traditionalist is not at all what he seems. He is in ‘mysterious and inalienable intimacy’ with the thing he no longer possesses, he is a haven for the bond between heaven and earth in times of an oblivion dictated by worldly desires that infiltrated into the temple: it is his very own poverty and his very own solitude that create a place for soul and flesh to encounter greatness and wretchedness, salvation or perdition. The rock on which he can save himself or be shipwrecked is the evangelical life in the world - without being of the world.

The Current Catholic Situation: "The Betrayal of the Clerics"

Evil Hierarchs allied to the Powers of the World
persecuting and burning Holy Orthodoxy and Virginal Purity - not new!