Francis insults the dignity of the laity...

Mundabor writes:

"Francis has spoken in front of the usual, convenient audience of opportunists and assorted sycophants, and was applauded when he issued the following admonitions to his abused sheep: “do not clericalise the laity” and “don't be more Papist than the Pope”.

I must say I had to smile.

The laity is being “clericalised” (that is: seen as the authentic carriers of the Catholic message) because the clergy shamelessly, insistently, blatantly refuse to do their job. If the local priest talks rubbish all the time and the bloggers online talk sense, it is fairly obvious that everyone with even a faint interest in his salvation will look to the latter for his instruction, and will look at the former as an embarrassment at best and a disgrace at worst. Actually, woe to the one who swallows all the excrement the bad priest dishes to him and thinks he is being a good Catholic. He is dancing on the brink of hell as he smiles “peace beeeee with youuuuuuu” to his pew neighbour..."

Popes Benedict XVI and Saint John Paul II, like their predecessors, were not threatened by an informed laity as Francis is.  But then, they weren't spewing nonsense either.

Pope Benedict XVI emphasized that the laity are co-responsible for the Church
In other words, the laity are not "second-class" citizens within the Church.

The Catechism stresses that, "Since, like all the faithful, lay Christians are entrusted by God with the apostolate by virtue of their Baptism and Confirmation, they have the right and duty, individually or grouped in associations, to work so that the divine message of salvation may be known and accepted by all men throughout the earth. This duty is the more pressing when it is only through them that men can hear the Gospel and know Christ. Their activity in ecclesial communities is so necessary that, for the most part, the apostolate of the pastors cannot be fully effective without it." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 900).

In his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici (The Lay Members of Christ's Faithful People), Pope John Paul II reminded us that, "The voice of the Lord clearly resounds in the depths of each of Christ's followers who, through faith and the sacraments of Christian initiation is made like to Jesus Christ, is incorporated as a living member in the Church and has an active part in her mission of salvation." (No. 3).

Sadly, there are all too many clerics Like Francis who haven't really embraced this authentic teaching of the Magisterium. For such clerics, the laity are second-class citizens who are tolerated but not really embraced fully as collaborators in the life and mission of the Church.

This is most unfortunate. It was Pope Pius XII who said that, "The Faithful, more precisely the lay faithful, find themselves on the front lines of the Church's life; for them the Church is the animating principle for human society. Therefore, they in particular, ought to have an ever-clearer consciousness not only of belonging the Church, but of being the Church, that is to say, the community of the faithful on earth under the leadership of the Pope, the head of all, and of the Bishops in communion with him. These are the Church..." (Pius XII, Discourse to the New Cardinals, February 20, 1946: AAS 38 (1946), 149).

The truth of lay participation in the priesthood of Christ follows logically from the doctrine of the Mystical Body. Everyone who is incorporated into the Mystical Body participates in the dignities, honors, and offices of the Mystical Head (Jesus). "Because Christ is our head," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "that which was conferred upon him, was also in him conferred upon us" (Summa Theologica, III, q. 58, a.4, ad 1). Or, as Pope John Paul II put it: "Referring to the baptized as 'new born babes', the apostle Peter writes: 'Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ ... you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light' (1 Pt 2:4-5, 9).

A new aspect to the grace and dignity coming from Baptism is here introduced: the lay faithful participate, for their part, in the threefold mission of Christ as Priest, Prophet and King. This aspect has never been forgotten in the living tradition of the Church, as exemplified in the explanation which St. Augustine offers for Psalm 26: 'David was anointed king. In those days only a king and a priest were anointed. These two persons prefigured the one and only priest and king who was to come, Christ (the name "Christ" means "anointed"). Not only has our head been anointed but we, his body, have also been anointed ... therefore anointing comes to all Christians, even though in Old Testament times it belonged only to two persons. Clearly we are the Body of Christ because we are all "anointed" and in him are "christs", that is, "anointed ones", as well as Christ himself, "The Anointed One". In a certain way, then, it thus happens that with head and body the whole Christ is formed..'

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, at the beginning of my pastoral ministry, my aim was to emphasize forcefully the priestly, prophetic and kingly dignity of the entire People of God..." (Christifideles Laici, No. 14).

This emphasis has been abandoned by the Masonic Francis as he seeks to destroy the Church from within.

On the anniversary of the La Salette apparition: Is prophecy being fulfilled in our own day?

A New York Times article is reporting that, "Pope Francis, in the first extensive interview of his six-month-old papacy, said that the Roman Catholic Church had grown 'obsessed' with preaching about abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he has chosen not to speak of those issues despite recriminations from some critics." See here.

This is nothing less than bizarre and an insult to Pope Benedict XVI who said, not long ago at Fatima, that abortion and same-sex "marriage" are among the most "insidious and dangerous" threats facing the world today. See here.

Dr. Jeff Mirus gets it. He wrote: "The writing is on the wall. Gay marriage is the lie that will create the next Gulag. Indeed, gay marriage is the perfect totalitarian wedge, not least in a country like the United States, which has been capable of believing itself uniquely dedicated to liberty even in the midst of slavery and abortion. We Americans, it seems, will be quite willing to sing the praises of our liberty no matter how many of us lose it. It is our national myth, something we worship. But the cause of gay marriage fits the myth better than most issues because it really does seem that those who oppose it are denying life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to others. This denial can be accepted for the unborn, in the name of the liberty of their mothers, as it once was accepted for African Americans, who shared judicial non-personhood with the unborn. But gays are well-educated, wealthy and—above all—a logically favored projection of our moral culture. To inhibit their happiness, for any reason, seems just plain wrong.

Why should this be? First, it is necessary to note that the word “gay” refers not to those with homosexual inclinations but to those who champion behavior based on these inclinations as good. In fact, homosexuals who are not gay are a sign of contradiction to the gay world. They are scorned accordingly, in ways that even straights are not. The key to understanding the whole matter is that to be gay or to support the gay lifestyle is to approve and promote sterile sex.

The Western world in general has been hard at work promoting sterile sex for nearly a century now. We began by sanctioning the break-up of families through ever-easier divorce. Divorce is a kind of pretense that the marital covenant is ultimately sterile, in the sense that children do not matter. Next we embraced contraception so that our sexual pleasures could not be diminished through responsibility. Promiscuity inevitably followed, and with it abortion, which is simply fruitfulness in denial. We’ve covered our eyes and stopped our ears. “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can’t SEE you! I can’t HEAR you!”

A culture like this, a culture which embraces these values, has no argument against homosexual sex, no case against homosexual marriage. A huge percentage of our marriages are deliberately and totally sterile; most of the rest are deliberately sterile much of the time. Huge numbers of marriages, by deliberate design, result neither in children to preserve the race nor in future citizens to enhance and develop the social order. There is no conceivable public interest in such unions, and no significant personal interest in them either, apart from the fuel they temporarily provide for the couple’s doomed egoism à deux.

Far from having a natural revulsion against homosexual intimacy, modern Western culture can hardly help seeing it as the jewel which crowns and protects its own warped vision of sex. We recognize and defend a right of men and women to engage in sexual intimacy without fruit. It follows that rank prejudice must be the only reason anyone could possibly oppose the same freedom between men and men or women and women.

No group is more hateful to modern society than the perceived moralistic prigs who, out of what most perceive as religiously-motivated prejudice, seek to diminish the personal sexual liberty of others. Nothing could be more obvious in our current culture than that such people must be silenced and, if necessary, restrained. Moreover, it seems only right and just that their denunciation of the gay lifestyle and their opposition to gay marriage should be criminalized. In fact, it should be criminalized in the name of liberty. That is why gay marriage is the lie that will create the next Gulag.

The insistence on ignoring vice is the hallmark of a debased culture, but the insistence that a lie be publicly affirmed as true is the hallmark of ideological totalitarianism." (See here).

Archbishop Dolan gets it now. Shocked over recent editorials demanding the restriction of religious freedom and calls to coerce religious believers to accept same-sex "marriage," the Archbishop wrote, "We do worry indeed about this freedom of religion. Editorials already call for the removal of guarantees of religious liberty, with crusaders calling for people of faith to be coerced to acceptance of this redefinition. If the experience of those few other states and countries where this is already law is any indication, the churches, and believers, will soon be harassed, threatened, and hauled into court for their conviction that marriage is between one man, one woman, forever, bringing children into the world …"


I have been warning that this was coming since the 1990s. I have been laughed at and ridiculed for revealing the totalitarian nature of the radical homosexual movement. Back in June of 2005 I posted the following here at La Salette Journey:


Those who are promoting the homosexual agenda are using time-proven tactics which have been employed by secular humanists for some time now. In the words of Ralph Martin, "First, a plea is issued for a dominantly Christian society to 'tolerate' what appears to be a deviant behavior. Then pressure is applied to place the deviant behavior on an equal footing with traditional Christian values. Secular humanists argue that a pluralist society cannot do otherwise. They then try to make the deviant behavior seem normal and behavior governed by Christian values seem abnormal - a threat to a pluralist society. The last step is often to use the legal system to protect immorality and to undermine what Christians have always considered righteous behavior." (A Crisis of Truth, pp. 101-102).

Professor James Hitchcock, in his excellent work entitled "Catholicism and Modernity" (New York:Seabury Press, 1979, p. 86), explains the role of the media in this entire process: "The media's alleged commitment to 'pluralism' is at base a kind of hoax. The banner of pluralism is raised in order to win toleration for new ideas as yet unacceptable to the majority. Once toleration has been achieved, public opinion is systematically manipulated first to enforce a status of equality between the old and the new, then to assert the superiority of the new over the old. A final stage is often the total discrediting, even sometimes the banning, of what had previously been orthodox." (See here).

Truthfully, isn't that what we're witnessing in Canada and even in the United States (albeit to a still lesser degree)? Already there has been much talk in Canada about passing legislation which would make it a "hate crime" for churches - or individual priests and ministers - to refer to homosexuality as being sinful. The Gospel itself would constitute "hate literature" under legislation which is proposed by homosexual militants who have many friends in the government it would appear.

The United States isn't far behind. Soon, Christians who hold firm to what Sacred Scripture has to say about sodomy will be labelled 'dangerous' and in need of 're-education' or forced internment in a special 'camp.'  See here.  Perhaps those of us who remain "obstinate" in accepting God's Word will be dealt with in another 'final solution' offered by a society which has succumbed to the 'Dictatorship of Relativism.'

Let's hope and pray that the rest of the Church's hierarchy will awaken to the reality of our present situation and speak out as Archbishop Dolan now has.

But for now we have a Pope who seems indifferent to the threat before us.  Or perhaps he has his own designs?  Today is the anniversary of the La Salette apparition.  My father, who went to be with the Lord on this day during the Jubilee Year of 2,000, believed, as I do, that the Man of Sin will very soon make his appearance.  Is the La Salette prophecy being fulfilled in our own day?  See here.

German magazine Titanic attacks Pope Benedict XVI

The German magazine Titanic, founded in 1979 by former contributors and editors of Pardon, a satirical monthly, after they had a series of conflicts with their publisher, is mocking Pope Benedict XVI and holding the Holy Father up to contempt by depicting him as a senile and incontinent person.  See here.

In our modern, paganistic world, the authority of the Holy Father is often challenged, openly defied and even rejected.  The early Christians understood Peter's divinely appointed role.  They understood that the Lord Jesus appointed Peter to be the guardian and teacher of the Church.  They loved him, honored him and obeyed him.

It is the vocation of the Holy Father to proclaim the truth even though it may result in virulent attacks and contempt rather than respect.  But it must be understood that disobedience and insults against Christ's Vicar are, in reality, attacks against the loving Heart of Christ.

What do you suppose will be the reward for those who insult and attack the loving and Sacred Heart of Christ?  Every attack against the Vicar of Christ represents an attack on Jesus Christ which begs for chastisement.

And so let's pray:

Lord Jesus, shelter our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, under the protection of Your Sacred Heart.  Be his light, his strength and his consolation.

V.  Let us pray for our Pontiff

R.  The Lord presreve and give him life, and make him to be blessed upon the earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.

Amen.