France: Suicidal Bishop Closes Down His Best Parish

After eight years of "loyal" service, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter has been expelled from the diocese of Quimper-Léon, France.

Abbé Courtois - whom Abbé de Giacomoni, the new superior of the French District of the FSSP, assisted as deacon - celebrated his last solemn Mass on Sunday 25 August in the church of St Matthieu in Quimper.

After Mass, there was a farewell picnic for Abbés Courtois and Télisson.

Monsignor Dognin, the local bishop, decided that in future Sunday Masses would be celebrated by diocesan priests whom he could not find.

However, Mgr Dognin also asked the faithful to participate in the Eucharist "on certain important feasts as a sign of recognition of the validity of the sacraments celebrated in the universal Church", which means that there will be no Mass on these days.

Mgr Dognin also forbids the celebration of baptisms, marriages and confirmations according to the Roman rite.

Jean-Pierre Maugendre writes on PaixLiturgique.fr (2 September) that it is astonishing that 60 years after the conciliar declaration Dignitatis Humanae this can still happen.

Dignitatis Humanae states: "In religious matters, no one should be compelled to act against his or her conscience, nor should anyone be prevented from acting in accordance with his or her conscience within reasonable limits, whether in private or in public, alone or with others."

This insistence on the failed Novus Ordo is all the more surprising because 60 years ago there were 1,000 priests in the diocese of Quiper. After 60 years of the Novus Ordo there are 80 active priests left, including many imported from Africa.

In the eight years of its existence, the FSSP parish of Quimper has baptised 40 children and 15 adults and celebrated 22 marriages. It has produced 5 vocations (4 seminarians and 1 nun).

Maugendre stresses that unconditional obedience to the Novus Ordo begins with the acceptance of liturgical changes and ends with the pseudo-blessing of homosexual concubines.

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Scripture for today

 Sir 32:18-20; 32:28; 33:1-3

18 He that feareth the Lord, will receive his discipline: and they that will seek him early, shall find a blessing.
19 He that seeketh the law, shall be filled with it: and he that dealeth deceitfully, shall meet with a stumblingblock therein.
20 They that fear the Lord, shall find just judgment, and shall kindle justice as a light.
28 He that believeth God, taketh heed to the commandments: and he that trusteth in him, shall fare never the worse.
1 No evils shall happen to him that feareth the Lord, but in temptation God will keep him, and deliver him from evils.
2 A wise man hateth not the commandments and justices, and he shall not be dashed in pieces as a ship in a storm.
3 A man of understanding is faithful to the law of God, and the law is faithful to him.

'Anathematise those who teach new doctrines' – St Robert Bellarmine

 

St Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church, taught that laymen can discern true pastors from false by their contradiction of previous teaching – and that they should anathematise such false pastors.

SEP 02, 2024

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Editors’ Notes The following is an exclusive translation taken from St Robert Bellarmine’s Fifth Controversy (On the Clergy). The thesis of the wider question is as follows: “The right to elect the Pope and other ministers of the Church does not belong to the people by divine law.” This particular text is about what “the people” are to do in the face of heretical or erroneous preaching. It comes some way into the chapter, but stands apart from the other matters discussed in the chapter.

Some key points: 

Even the simple and unlearned are able to recognise a contradiction between a) what they are being taught at any given moment, and b) what they had previously been taught, and what the rest of the Church is being taught at that given moment.

In the event of such a contradiction, they are to adhere to what they had previously received.

While the formalised “recognise and resist system” is flawed and severely problematic, this text does justify a practical “adhere to tradition and leave questions for the future” approach on the part of “the people.”

However, speaking of the people: “We should anathematise those who teach new doctrines that are contrary to what has been preached before.”

He states that the people cannot “depose a false pastor if he is a bishop or substitute another in his place,” and that “the custom of the Church has always been that heretical bishops are deposed by councils of bishops or by the supreme pontiffs.” As discussed in the commentary and application below, sedevacantists do not depose anybody. As Wernz-Vidal say, we accept that “a declaratory sentence of the crime, which as merely declaratory, should not be rejected.”

However, parts of the text may appear to support certain systems or theories about the current crisis at one point, and other systems at another. For this reason, after presenting the text, we will then present comments and application for each section.

St Robert Bellarmine

Fifth Controversy: The Members of the Church – On the Clergy
Book I, Chapter VII
Available from Google Books.

Objection:

The second argument is as follows: 

The Lord commands (John 10) that we do not listen to the voice of strangers. Again, he instructs (Matthew 7) to flee from false prophets, and the Apostle (Galatians 1) orders that those who teach anything beyond the Gospel should be accursed. 

Therefore, the Christian people have a divine mandate by which they are bound to seek out and call upon good pastors, and to reject harmful ones.

The Answer

I respond that the people indeed ought to discern the true prophet from the false, but by no other rule than by carefully attending to whether the one who preaches says things contrary to those taught by his predecessors, or to those taught by other lawful pastors, and especially by the Apostolic See and the principal Church; for the people are commanded to listen to their own pastors: Luke 10: “He that heareth you, heareth me.” And Matthew 23: “What they say, do” (Luke 10:16, Matthew 23:3). 

Therefore, the people should not judge their pastor unless they hear something new and contrary to the doctrine of other pastors.

Furthermore, this is what Paul advises in Galatians 1: that we should anathematise those who teach new doctrines that are contrary to what has been preached before. 

Moreover, since the people are unlearned, they cannot otherwise judge the doctrine of their pastor.

Read the rest: https://www.wmreview.org/p/bellarmine-de-clericis

BREAKING: Casting stones at doctrine

Here the Vatican and the pope pervert the authority of the Church to make up new sins and to promote the error of denying that sins are always personal before they are social. As well, the common sense judgment that one can only sincerely express sorrow for one’s own sins is also denied.

The men who here promote and participate in a mockery of confession need to confess the sin of casting stones at doctrine.

Pope John Paul II dealt with the error of speaking of social sin without its necessary relation to personal sins in his encyclical letter Reconciliatio et Penitentia.

“… there is one meaning sometimes given to social sin that is not legitimate or acceptable even though it is very common in certain quarters today.(74) This usage contrasts social sin and personal sin, not without ambiguity, in a way that leads more or less unconsciously to the watering down and almost the abolition of personal sin, with the recognition only of social guilt and responsibilities. According to this usage, which can readily be seen to derive from non-Christian ideologies and systems-which have possibly been discarded today by the very people who formerly officially upheld them-practically every sin is a social sin, in the sense that blame for it is to be placed not so much on the moral conscience of an individual, but rather on some vague entity or anonymous collectivity such as the situation, the system, society, structures or institutions.

“Whenever the church speaks of situations of sin or when she condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behavior of certain social groups, big or small, or even of whole nations and blocs of nations, she knows and she proclaims that such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals. 

“A situation-or likewise an institution, a structure, society itself-is not in itself the subject of moral acts. Hence a situation cannot in itself be good or bad.”

RP no. 16

Data and the Traditional Latin Mass

 Some of the preliminary results suggest the TLM community, while drawn to a different aesthetic than the typical parish experience, holds onto the beliefs of the Catholic faith more consistently than the wider population of Catholics,

September 3, 2024 Stephen Bullivant, Cranney CranneyPrint

A sacramentary is seen on the altar during a traditional Tridentine Mass July 18, 2021, at St. Josaphat Church in the Queens borough of New York City. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

Recently rumors have been flying that Pope Francis is preparing to impose stringent restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass. Of course, unfounded rumors out of the Vatican are not new, and some journalists have not been able to identify anybody who has actually seen the document in question.

Still, even if it ends up being in the class of “Pope Francis is dying” rumors that we have heard for years, such a document would be in character for a pontificate that has emphasized placing hedges around the more conservative, traditional elements of the Church. While his predecessor’s position towards the Latin Mass community can be broadly characterized as one of accommodation, Pope Francis has taken a more confrontational approach.

But why? What is the problem with allowing what is by all measures a small fraction of Catholics to participate in a licit Mass that they find beautiful, reverent, and holy? The very real fact is that Traditional Latin Mass participation has been associated with factions inside the Church who do not accept Vatican II and may even be quasi-schismatic, and multiple popes have taken a variety of approaches in how to deal with groups such as the SSPX.

It is not our place to tell the Holy Father what to do; we are social scientists, not bishops, and one of us is not even Catholic; however, the extent to which the TLM community is a schismatic hotbed of negative attitudes towards Vatican II is ultimately an empirical one that is scientifically investigable, and on this point there has been a clear lack of objective, systematically collected data.

The Prefect for the Dicastery for Divine Worship, Cardinal Arthur Roche, has made it clear that he thinks the TLM has a different liturgical theology than the Novus Ordo. There is also the argument that the TLM is an implied, if not explicit, rejection of Vatican II. It seems the Holy Father himself holds this view. Conclusions based on impressions are suspect if they are not supported by more objective evidence.

In announcing Traditiones Custodes (the 2021 round of Latin Mass restrictions), the Pope invoked a survey that he had disseminated among bishops on the question of the Latin Mass. However, in addition to the fact that the survey was of bishops and not Traditional Latin Mass-goers themselves, the wordings used, the exact responses, the representativeness—any one of many things that would be required for a professional survey statistician to objectively gauge the validity of the survey—were completely unknown. Therefore it is difficult to know how seriously to take the results of the survey when only the vaguest details are known.

We, a professor of sociology and theology (and a TLM attender) and a demography/sociology dual-PhD data scientist, have been striving to remedy the lack of transparent, systematically collected, objective data on the TLM community in preparation for a book we are writing: collating all previously published information on the demographics and attitudes of the TLM community (it is not a lot), as well as conducting our own surveys and supplementing our quantitative data with approximately 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews of TLM Catholics across the country. While our study is on the United States TLM community in particular, given the American Church’s reputation as a hotbed of conservativism, we believe our findings have broad implications.

So what did we find? While we are still processing our data, some relevant themes have already emerged. There is obviously a lot to talk about with TLM Mass-goers, which we will discuss in greater detail in the book, but in broad strokes, this is some of what we learned about Traditional Latin Mass Catholics in the United States:

• There is some truth to the conventional wisdom that they tend to be politically conservative. Of the 446 respondents in our survey who attend the Traditional Latin Mass at least once per year, 77% of them lean Republican.
• They are very, very pro-life. 85% of the TLM Catholics in our sample believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases, whereas 13% believe it should be illegal in most cases, while only 1.6% believe it should be legal in most cases, and less than 1% believe that it should be legal in all cases.
• They are orthodox. In our survey only 2% of TLM Catholics believe that the bread and wine of communion are symbols, as opposed to the Real Presence, of the body and blood of Christ. In a similarly worded Pew survey of general Catholics, 69% considered the Eucharist a symbol.
• They generally accept the Second Vatican Council. When we asked “I accept the teachings of Vatican II”
• 4% Strongly disagreed
• 7% Disagreed
• 10% Somewhat disagreed
• 15% Neither agreed nor disagreed
• 15% Somewhat agreed
• 27% Agreed
• 22% Strongly agreed
• Read the rest: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/09/03/data-and-the-traditional-latin-mass/

Made, not begotten: Why we said “No!” to in vitro fertilization

We should not expect much courage from politicians, but Christians are called to bear witness to the truth, regardless of what opinion polls show. And the truth is that IVF is wrong.

August 29, 2024 Nathanael BlakePrint

(Image: Ricardo Moura/Unsplash.com)

When my wife and I said “No” to in vitro fertilization, we assumed that we were rejecting our last hope of bearing children. Our years of infertility were unexplained and unresolved, despite the best efforts of the Catholic Ob/Gyn practice we had been going to. They had been thorough, and the physician who offered us a second opinion had nothing to add—except pushing us to try IVF.

We did not.

Despite this apparently being the final nail in the coffin of our hopes of conceiving children together, it was not a difficult decision; we had long ago concluded that the suffering of being barren was not a justification for sin.

Believing that IVF is wrong is a minority view, as demonstrated by the response to a recent Alabama Supreme Court decision. The court sided with a couple whose embryos had negligently been destroyed, ruling that human embryos, whether in the lab, or in the womb, are persons under state law. This decision did not ban IVF, but having to treat human embryos as, well, human, would crimp the style of the loosely regulated IVF industry. Democrats quickly pounced, denouncing embryonic personhood as a mortal threat to IVF, and Republicans, led by Donald Trump, folded as fast as they could, loudly proclaiming their love for IVF and disclaiming efforts to regulate it. Alabama Republicans quickly passed a law protecting IVF clinics from lawsuits brought in response to negligence or misconduct.

We should not expect much courage from politicians, but Christians are called to bear witness to the truth, regardless of what opinion polls show. And the truth is that IVF is wrong. As practiced, IVF is a moral catastrophe in which the fertility industry manufactures and destroys human embryos on a vast scale—tens or even hundreds of thousands every year in the US alone. This is done because creating more embryos offers more chances for a successful pregnancy. However, this also ensures a lot of discarded human lives, especially because the industry is aggressively eugenic, from providing sex-selection to culling embryos suspected of being inferior in some way. Additionally, IVF is integral to the evils of surrogacy, in which the well-to-do order children and gestate them by renting the wombs of poor and working-class women—the same people who endlessly invoke the specter of The Handmaid’s Tale cheer when homosexual men lease the wombs of poor women in Eastern Europe.

Read the rest:  https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/08/29/made-not-begotten-why-we-said-no-to-in-vitro-fertilization/