by Don Elia, Catholic priest
Dominus de caelo prospexit super filios hominum, ut videat si est intellegens, aut requirens Deum. Vacate, et videte quoniam ego sum Deus: exaltabor in gentibus, et exaltabor in terra (Ps 13, 2; 45, 11).
Two weeks ago the Church in Italy woke up and to her surprise discovered she had become the Chinese Patriotic Association.
An exceptional situation brought to light what our Pastors really are. The unconditional subjection which, in these weeks, they are demonstrating towards the State is something which, in the history of the country, had not yet been seen, not even in the Ventennio (the era of Benito Mussolini: October 1922-1943). At that time, on the other hand, priests and bishops generally had the attributes and had been tempered by sixty years of confrontation with a declaredly Masonic regime.
But now seven decades of prostitution with various lovers, instead, have tamed our hierarchy into more than a walking dog: things never seen before, not even in the times of the bubonic plague. After all, the Church, they say, has opened herself up to a world, which certainly did not respond with conversion but rather has come to triumphantly install itself within her with its ideas, its vices and its pretensions. To lower one’s guard and embrace the enemy, when one is in battle, is obviously suicide, but a pastoral council unilaterally decreed that the war was over and that the adversaries – whether they knew it or not – had all become our brothers. The worst, however, is that this surrender disguised as an offer of friendship was the result of a denial of faith or, better, of its replacement with an ideological surrogate compatible with worldly thinking.
By now it is clear: what is taught in seminaries and theological faculties, to be then cleared through customs in parishes, is no longer the Catholic faith, but a vulgar forgery of it. The luminous clarity and virile incisiveness of traditional doctrine have been replaced by a mixture of smoky, bumpy and puerile ideas that cloud minds, when they do not come to reduce brains to mush. The behavior of the clergy in recent weeks is a factual demonstration of this sad reality. The outgoing ministers of the Church, indomitable heralds of indiscriminate welcome, open ports, ‘bridges instead of walls’, are entrenched behind heavy armored doors in their rectories and bishoprics, keeping at a safe distance those few faithful so senseless as to go to ask for absolution or communion… “Unbelievable! To demand these luxuries at a time of such danger! But there are still those who have not understood that everything has changed: by now we have discovered that the good Lord is merciful – and therefore everyone is saved, whether they want to be saved or not.” — Paradise has become obligatory; the Sacraments, on the other hand, are merely optional invigorating agents. And then, we are finally forced to fully recognize the value of the common priesthood of all the faithful!… What shall we call this type of argumentation? Theological brigandage?
A certain clergy is so “advanced” that they do not realize that their image of God is nothing more than the projection of an immature self that considers Him a distributor of confirmations, regardless of the real state of the soul, merits and demerits. This bizarre idea (which totally ignores the notion of subsisting Being, with all that follows) derives from a strange mixture of a spurious biblicalism that selects and deforms Scripture detached from Tradition and a twisted psychology that sanctions vice and sin as normality. In fact, it is a mere imaginary means that serves to reassure the “I” in times of difficulty, but it is incapable of intervening effectively in human affairs and, as a result, turns out to be insignificant: it is something one can do without, unless it becomes useful as an ingredient of positive thinking. Such a vain conception would be simply ridiculous, if it did not lead straight to practical atheism, typical of the consumerist attitude of contemporary society. The theoretical one, although rationally absurd, is far more demanding, since it forces man to grit his teeth and do everything himself, however vainly and hopelessly.
Certain decisions give the impression that a substantial part of the pretenders no longer believes in anything, but uses its position in the Church solely to ensure material security unencumbered by serious and constant commitment. From this point of view, the sustenance of the clergy has been resolved at the serious expense of pastoral ministry, since it is dispensed without any relation to the real efficiency of a priest. In order to make a living, at one time, most priests had to make a concrete effort; before the institution of the state-pension for priests, parish priests lived off the offerings of the faithful and the ecclesiastical benefits, things that evidently varied greatly from place to place. In any case, whatever their needs, they consumed themselves by spending even hours at the bedside of every dying person in their parish, plying their way through the streets to bring communion to the sick or for the numerous processions that marked the liturgical year, locking himself up for whole days in the confessional on the occasion of great feasts… This does not mean, of course, that everything was done out of pure zeal of souls, but that there was a sense of duty that the current system, animated by that fake theology that justifies everything and the opposite of everything, has simply annihilated.
The new Concordat, on the basis of post-conciliar pseudo-theology, has practically transformed clerics into well gagged and trained civil servants, of a loyalty and surrender that one would not even dream of demanding from others. The bishops reacted to the health emergency as sub-prefects of a strictly atheistic regime: Congratulations! The worst form of clericalism is that of those who, by covering themselves under the dispositions of civil authority and implicitly placing it above divine authority, deprive the faithful of the spiritual goods to which they have a sacrosanct right and abandon them to themselves in their hour of need. These clergy have revealed themselves for what they are: mercenaries. It was inevitable, on the other hand, that those who read Mao as young men would then find themselves carrying out the same duties as an official of the department for religious affairs of the Chinese Communist Party, just like a bishop or a priest enrolled in the Patriotic Association. The Catholic Church, in a similar context, can also formally exist, but only under total governmental control, suspended from a nod of approval or denial by any dictatorship of the nomenklatura. This is further confirmation that the Marxist regimes have been nothing more than a large-scale experiment of a fully bureaucratic world order, with a fully planned economy and absolute supervision of the population, reduced to a consumer mass whose needs are artificially determined by occult powers.
Atheistic materialism, functional to this result, has become the usual mental atmosphere also in the West, in the theoretically “free” countries. The “Church” in dialogue with the world, coherently, has launched itself into environmentalist battles for the defense of the common home, but it has nothing more to say to lighten the drama of illness and death. The best she can do is prostrate herself at the feet of state officials, completely forgetting the obligations that derive from her mission: she no longer knows how to speak of eternal salvation, of atoning suffering, of just punishment, of abandonment to Providence… All this, just as it horrifies the dominant thought, so it repulses many of her own ministers, who show that they no longer believe in it and, for this reason, no longer have any reason to be (other than the task and sustenance). What do you want celibacy to count for those who have lost their identity and lost their reason for being in the world? The problem is much deeper than the sacrosanct ecclesiastical discipline, but with the usual diversionary operation they have managed to divert attention by setting fire to the debate on a particular point, so as to make the real poison of the Amazonian synod, naturalistic pantheism, go unnoticed.
Thus goes the “faith” of most of the clergy: it is a bland Enlightenment deism: their “divinity” is a vague reassuring idea, an indefinite entity that should comfort us in difficult times, but is unable to intervene in creation or history; the concept of divine punishment would be nothing more than a legacy paying tribute to myth. The Marxist mentality that has permeated today’s culture is easily reconciled (being a further development) with the Kantian vision of a religiosity devoid of transcendence, but immanent to human thought, which is rooted in the subjectivism of the Lutheran conception of faith. If then we want to try to explain the incredible mental rigidity shown, in the present conjuncture, by an otherwise super-elastic clergy in areas in which it is instead strictly bound, we must go back to the common source of such aberrations, that is, to the Phariseism of those who filter the gnats and swallow the camels. It is Talmudic Judaism, with its overwhelming claim to ensure absolute impeccability excluding even the slightest or remote possibility of being accused. Following a similar criterion, even going to pray in a church could spread the contagion and is therefore automatically equivalent to killing an unspecified number of people. In their absurd ramblings, they do not realize that, with their serious omissions, they kill a large number of souls, starting with their own.
The effects of ecclesiastical measures, thus, are worse than those of the virus. The Gospel, instead, continually shows us that Jesus, in order to obey the Father, apparently disobeyed the religious authorities of His time, who with artificial doctrines had manipulated the divine law for their use and consumption until it was annulled. That the contagion is spread by going to church is an extremely remote danger and therefore does not involve the slightest moral responsibility. On the other hand, do people not go to work, to the supermarket or the pharmacy, since they cannot do without it? The same risk that one runs in order to ensure the nourishment and health of the body, cannot one run in order to guarantee those of the soul? But what do our Pastors believe in, if they still believe in anything at all?
As one of the faithful of Rome writing to me said, in this circumstance, “one is discovering who is a true priest and who is not”. Another reader observes that, after this emergency, “nothing will be the same as before”. She is right: the Lord is sifting His ministers to distinguish clearly who still has faith from those who have lost it or have never had it, who is worthy of trust from those who play a sleazy comedy, who is to be followed by those who are to be abandoned. Many clerics have lost all credibility; the faithful people will know well how to deal with them.
And so “the Lord, from heaven, looks to the children of men to see if there is one who is intelligent or who seeks God” (Ps 13:2) with prayer and penance; but he must take note that “all have deviated and at the same time have become useless” (Ps 13:3). The Almighty therefore thunders with a mighty voice to launch an extreme call: “Calm yourselves and consider that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted on earth” (Ps 45:11). It is the living God who speaks, the Creator of the world and Lord of history, the One who has total control of nature and gives to each one according to His works (cf. Ps 61:13; Pr 24:12; Jer 32:19; Mt 16:27; Rom 2:6; Rev 22:12). He punishes evil, both in this life and in the future, but in His mercy He uses the scourges also for our correction. This is how God revealed Himself: after eliminating the Tradition, do they want to trash even the Bible? Will they be so impudent, in the colossal mystification they are perpetrating, as to reach such a degree of intellectual dishonesty? They’d better think it over. Therefore, multiply the Rosaries for their conversion, as well as, of course, for the protection of your families! for the end of the epidemic, for the healing of the sick and – not least – for many who die without religious comfort and without funeral.
When the master of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those farmers? He will make the wicked wretched perish miserably and entrust his vineyard to other peasants, who will bear fruit in their time (Mt 21:41).
+ + +
