An
Urgent Appeal to Pope Francis
Either Change Course or Renounce
the Petrine Office
December 8, 2015
Feast of the Immaculate Conception
A Guest Document
by The Remnant
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The
Letter
Your Holiness:
Pope Celestine V (r. 1294), recognizing his incapacity
for the office to which he had so unexpectedly been elected as the
hermit Peter of Morrone, and seeing the grave harm his bad governance
had caused, resigned the papacy after a reign of only five months. He
was canonized in 1313 by Pope Clement V. Pope Boniface VIII, removing
any doubt about the validity of such an extraordinary papal act,
confirmed in perpetuity (ad perpetuam rei memoriam) that “the Roman
Pontiff may freely resign.”
A growing number of Catholics, including cardinals and bishops, are
coming to recognize that your pontificate, also the result of an
unexpected election, is likewise causing grave harm to the Church. It
has become impossible to deny that you lack either the capacity or the
will to do what your predecessor rightly observed a pope must do:
“constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in
the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form
of opportunism.”
Quite the contrary, as shown in the annexed libellus, you have given many
indications of an alarming hostility to the Church’s traditional
teaching, discipline and customs, and the faithful who try to defend
them, while being preoccupied with social and political questions
beyond the competence of the Roman Pontiff. Consequently, the Church’s
enemies continually delight in your pontificate, exalting you above all
your predecessors. This appalling situation has no parallel in Church
history.
Last year, speaking of Pope Benedict’s resignation, Your Holiness
declared that if you felt incapable of exercising the papacy “I would
do the same.” On the first anniversary of Benedict’s resignation, you
called upon the faithful to “join me in prayer for His Holiness
Benedict XVI, a man of great courage and humility.”
With no little trepidation, being under the gaze of the One who will
judge us all on the Last Day, we your subjects respectfully petition
Your Holiness to change course for the good of the Church and the
welfare of souls. Failing this, would it not be better for Your
Holiness to renounce the Petrine office than to preside over what
threatens to be a catastrophic compromise of the Church’s integrity?
In this regard we make our own the words of Saint Catherine of Siena,
Doctor of the Church, in her famous letter to Pope Gregory XI, urging
him to steer the Church aright during one of her greatest crises:
“Since He has given you authority and you have assumed it, you should
use your virtue and power: and if you are not willing to use it, it
would be better for you to resign what you have assumed…”
Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us!
Your subjects in Christ,
(List of signatures may be found in original publication)
Libellus
Your predecessor Benedict XVI, sitting for the first time in the Chair
of Peter, reminded the Catholic faithful that “[t]he Pope is not an
absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law,” but rather “the
Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word.”
Accordingly, said Benedict, a Pope “must
not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself
and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it
or water it down, and every form of opportunism.”
The course of your pontificate thus far has compelled us to declare
publicly that you have failed to respect the nature of the Petrine
office, abusing it in a manner the Church has never before witnessed.
We hereby present to Your Holiness the main concerns that have aroused
alarm in all ranks of the Church and have motivated this petition.
First, rather than the constant
teaching of the Church concerning God’s word, you have consistently
proclaimed your own ideas in homilies, press conferences, off-the-cuff
remarks, interviews with journalists, speeches of various kinds, and
idiosyncratic readings of Scripture. These ideas, ranging from the
disturbing to the plainly heterodox, are well represented in your
personal manifesto, Evangelii Gaudium.
This document contains a number of astonishing proclamations the likes
of which no Roman Pontiff has ever dared to utter. Among these are your
“dream… of transforming everything, so
that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules,
language and structures can be suitably channeled for the
evangelization of today’s world rather
than for her self-preservation.” It is incredible that a Roman
Pontiff would posit a non-existent opposition between the
self-preservation of the Holy Catholic Church and her mission in the
world.
Second, rather than binding
yourself and the Church to obedience to God’s word, you have repeatedly
deprecated apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions, along with the
faithful who defend them. Here too Evangelii
Gaudium sums up your line of thought: “More than by fear of
going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining
shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security,
within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us
feel safe while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire
of saying to us: ‘Give them something to eat’ (Mk 6:37).”
The Catholic mind staggers at the spectacle of a Roman Pontiff
belittling the Church’s constitution, doctrines and customs as mere
“structures,” “rules” and “habits” that rob people of spiritual
sustenance, leaving them to starve at the Church’s door. You dare to
say this respecting the very Church that built and transformed entire
civilizations, nurturing countless saints, religious orders, priestly
and religious vocations and institutes of charity for the salvation of
souls and incomparable works of corporal mercy.
At the same time, you have so frequently derided the faithful who
defend the Church’s traditions that one observer has compiled a “Little
Book of Insults” recording many examples of this unprecedented verbal
assault by a Pope against his own subjects. Among the epithets you have
hurled at observant Catholics with reckless abandon are these:
“fundamentalists,” “Pharisees,” “Pelagians,” “triumphalists,”
“Gnostics,” “nostalgists,” “superficial Christians,” “band of the
chosen,” “peacocks,” “moralistic quibblers” “uniformists,” “proud,
self-sufficient,” “intellectual aristocrats,” “Christian bats who
prefer the shadows to the light of the presence of the Lord,” etc.
Yet, not a single harsh word have you uttered concerning open enemies
of the doctrines of the Faith or the sexual deviants who infest the
Catholic hierarchy. On the contrary, you declared “Who am I to judge?”
respecting “gay persons” among the clergy, and in particular the
notorious homosexual cleric you have made the head of your very
household, who shows a revolting familiarity with your person. You have
granted widely publicized audiences to sexual deviants, including
transsexuals and homosexuals, arranging these encounters personally by
telephone. You have rehabilitated and even rewarded with prestigious
appointments liberation theologians silenced and suspended by your two
immediate predecessors, promoters of homosexuality, and prelates who
covered up the sexual crimes of homosexual priests.
Evangelii Gaudium aptly
summarizes the open contempt—without precedent in the annals of the
papacy—with which you view the defenders of doctrinal and liturgical
rectitude. You ridicule “an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy,
for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige” and rashly accuse
tradition-minded Catholics of being “without any concern that the
Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete
needs of the present time,” cruelly and unjustly caricaturing them as
people who would reduce the Church to “a museum piece or something
which is the property of a select few.”
A moment deeply revealing of your contemptuous mentality in this regard
was your humiliation of an altar boy, broadcast to the world and
memorialized on the Internet. As he stood in a prayerful posture, hands
folded, at the entrance to the Vatican grottoes, which you were
visiting, you pulled his hands apart, mocking him with the words: “Are
your hands bound together? Ah, it seems they’re stuck!” To his credit,
the boy put his hands back together immediately, resuming the
comportment appropriate to the dignity of the occasion and in keeping
with a sound spiritual formation. But one wonders what effect this
public humiliation, now permanently accessible to the whole world, will
have upon the spiritual life of an impressionable youngster.
In perhaps the most injurious of your insults of the faithful, Evangelii Gaudium denounces
traditional Catholics for what you suppose to be “a self-absorbed
promethean neopelagianism.” Presuming their interior dispositions, you
declare that these Catholics “feel superior to others because they
observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular
Catholic style from the past”—as if our holy religion involved “styles”
that become outmoded like fashions in clothing. You even go so far as
to mock “a supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline” as
“narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of
evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others…”
For the sake of truth and justice, Holy Father, we must say that it
seems you yourself have spent a great deal of time analyzing,
classifying and indeed judging others—to
the growing dismay and
embarrassment of your subjects, who have never seen such behavior from
a Roman Pontiff. And this behavior shows no signs of abating. Recently,
at a conference on priestly formation, you remarked—to laughter from
your audience—that you are “scared of rigid priests… I keep away from
them. They bite!” What purpose does such derisive rhetoric serve but to
humiliate and marginalize those priests who still have the courage to
defend the Church’s unpopular teachings without compromise in a world
at war against God and His law? No wonder the mass media hail your
pontificate!
But, more than words, Holy Father, you have directed the outright
persecution of religious orders intent on restoring orthodoxy, sober
piety, the interior life and liturgical tradition in the midst of what
your own predecessor described as the “calamities” and “sufferings” the
Church has endured in the name of Vatican II, including “closed
seminaries, closed convents, banalized liturgy…” On your specific
orders, the flourishing Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate have been
destroyed on account of what your apostolic commissioner (who later
died of a stroke) called a “definitely traditionalist drift.” The
affiliated Sisters of the Immaculate have likewise been placed under an
apostolic commissioner on account of “deviations” consisting of a
supposed “pre-conciliar” formation—meaning the traditional liturgy and
the traditional conventual life, as if these holy things were
contagions to be expunged from the Church like some disease. These are
the actions of a dictator motivated by an ideology, not a paternal
guardian of the Church’s sacred patrimony.
Yet, following a years-long investigation and disciplinary process
initiated by Pope Benedict, under your supervision the Leadership
Conference of Women Religious has been whitewashed and spared any
discipline despite its support for abortion, euthanasia and “same-sex
marriage” and its notorious promotion of what Cardinal Müller, Prefect
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, described as “fundamental errors regarding the
omnipotence of God, the Incarnation of Christ, the reality of Original
Sin, the necessity of salvation and the definitive nature of the
salvific action of Christ in the Paschal Mystery.”
Third, in keeping with your
programmatic disparagement of the Church’s traditional doctrine and
discipline and those who defend them, you presided over and controlled
a “Synod on the Family” that amounted to a sustained attempt to water
down or adapt the Church’s infallible teaching on marriage, procreation
and sexuality in order to accommodate the rebellious spirit of the age
and the immorality it has fostered throughout our post-Christian
civilization.
In the name of “mercy,” the progressive prelates who dominate your
circle of advisors, including the infamous Cardinal Kasper—whose views
you have been promoting from the beginning of your pontificate—now
proclaim a false disjunction between doctrine and its intrinsically
related pastoral practice, as if the Church could forbid immoral
behavior in principle while accommodating it in practice. As one
prominent cardinal has put it, this “is a form of heresy, a dangerous
schizophrenic pathology.” Yet it has become a theme of your
pontificate, as you invoke “mercy” endlessly against the Church’s moral
laws, which you demean as “small-minded rules,” “roadblocks,” “closed
doors,” and “casuistry.”
The progressives you personally appointed to the Synod’s secretariat
and drafting commission, and the 45 additional progressives you added
to the voting membership, including Cardinal Kasper, combined to attack
the indissolubility of marriage by advocating “case by case” admission
of the divorced and “remarried” to Holy Communion. This would mean the
overthrow of the Church’s bimillennial sacramental discipline, rooted
in the words of Our Lord Himself: “Every one that putteth away his
wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery… (Lk. 16:18).” That
discipline was reaffirmed by Benedict XVI and John Paul II in the face
of challenges by dissenters from Catholic teaching—Cardinal Kasper
being foremost among them. It is readily apparent that you wish to
abandon that discipline, as you did when you were Archbishop of Buenos
Aires and when, even as Pope, you personally telephoned a woman in
Argentina, civilly married to a divorced man, to tell her that she
could receive Holy Communion despite what her “rigid” parish priest had
said to the contrary.
At the Synod’s first session in 2014, you personally approved and
ordered published to the world, before the Synod Fathers had even seen
it, a synodal “midterm report” which was never approved by them and was
in fact a fabrication, apparently written in advance, that did not even
remotely represent their actual consensus. This disgraceful document
called for a “case by case” abandonment of the discipline of the Church
respecting the divorced and “remarried” and for “valuing” the
homosexual “orientation.” One courageous prelate called it “a black
mark which has stained the honour of the Apostolic See.” Yet, after the
Synod majority rightly rejected it, you denounced “so-called…
traditionalists” for “wanting to close [themselves] within the written
word… and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of
surprises…” And then you ordered the same document to be circulated to
the world’s bishops, along with three paragraphs in the final report
that failed to receive the requisite majority but which you ordered
included anyway, having “torn up the rule book” of a Synod that was
“rigged” to achieve a preordained result, but by the grace of God
failed to do so.
At the Synod’s second session in 2015, you required that all
deliberations be based upon an Instrumentum
Laboris so heterodox that
an international coalition of clergy and laity warned that it “threatens the entire structure of
Catholic teaching on marriage, the family and human sexuality…”
When that document was likewise rejected by the Synod majority and
replaced at the last minute by a compromise document—which nonetheless
creates openings for the overthrow of the Church’s sacramental
discipline)—you denounced “closed hearts which frequently hide even
behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in
the chair of Moses and judge... difficult cases.” That is, you
condemned the Synod Fathers who had defended the constant sacramental
discipline of the Church.
In your evident determination to accommodate the divorced and civilly
“remarried,” whom you inexplicably characterize as “the poor,” just
before Synod 2015 you devised in secret, without consulting any
competent Vatican dicastery, a sudden and drastic “streamlining” of the
annulment process. A world-renowned canonist, reflecting widespread
alarm over this improvident “reform,” described it as “providing a path
that looks like the Catholic version of no-fault divorce.” You yourself
freely acknowledged that “it has not escaped me how an abbreviated
judgment might put at risk the principle of indissolubility of
marriage…”
Fourth, in keeping with your
astounding suggestion—promptly hailed by the mass media—that the Church
has been “obsessed” with “abortion, gay marriage and the use of
contraceptive methods,” by your own admission you “have not spoken much
about these things, and I was reprimanded for that.” Yet these grave
evils threaten the very survival of our civilization in the midst of
what John Paul II called a “culture of death” and “silent apostasy.”
While quite vocal concerning many political issues, you were utterly
silent when once Catholic Ireland legalized “gay marriage” by popular
referendum and the United States Supreme Court imposed this abomination
on all fifty states.
On the other hand, as the Western world descends into an abyss of
depravity and Muslim fanatics are massacring Christians throughout the
Middle East, in Africa and in the very heart of Europe, you are
preoccupied with “climate change.” Your book length encyclical, Laudato si’, the only encyclical
you have produced, posits the existence of an “ecological crisis” and
uncritically adopts the ideologically motivated, strongly contested
claims of “climate change science,” which a Pope has absolutely no
competence to assess, much less present to the faithful as indisputable
facts.
The same encyclical laments “global warming,” the excessive use of
air-conditioning, the loss of mangrove swamps, the supposed threat to
plankton and worms, and the extinction of various plants and
animals—denouncing this as an offense to God—before it even mentions
abortion (while failing utterly to mention the supremely anti-natural
practice of contraception). As to abortion, the encyclical speaks only
of a failure “to protect a human embryo” when in fact abortion is the
brutal mass murder of innocent human beings, ripped limb from limb in
the womb or stabbed to death with surgical scissors at the very moment
of birth.
Not surprisingly, the powers of the world have universally acclaimed
Laudato si’ as part of “the
Francis revolution” which the media,
including the progressive “Catholic” press, have been lauding
throughout your pontificate.
Fifth, you have consistently
dismissed all doctrinal differences with Protestants as insignificant
and have repeatedly declared, quite falsely, that “all the baptized are
members of the same Body of Christ, his
Church.” Here too you ignore the teaching of John Paul II,
Benedict XVI, and every Pope before them, including Pius XI, who taught
quite to the contrary concerning the condition of Protestants: “For
since the mystical body of Christ, in the same manner as His physical
body, is one, compacted and fitly joined together, it were foolish and
out of place to say that the mystical body is made up of members which
are disunited and scattered abroad: whosoever therefore is not united
with the body is no member of it, neither
is he in communion with Christ its head.”
In this regard you seem heedless of the ever-worsening immorality and
heresy of the same Protestant sects that engage in endless, pointless
“ecumenical dialogue” with the Vatican. After fifty years of “dialogue”
these sects condone divorce, contraception, abortion, homosexuality and
“gay marriage,” purport to ordain women and practicing homosexuals as
“priests” and “bishops,” and continue adamantly to reject fundamental
dogmas of the one true religion revealed by Christ for the salvation of
the world.
What of the truth that makes us free? (John 8:32) What of the witness
of countless saints and martyrs who expended their substance and laid
down their very lives to defend and pass on the Catholic Faith in
opposition to the manifold errors and societal destruction spawned by
the Protestant revolt, whose final consequences are playing out before
your very eyes?
Sixth, in recent days, your
public statements seem to have become increasingly careless and
disordered, causing even greater scandal and apprehension among the
faithful:
On November 15, during your Sunday participation in a Lutheran prayer
service, you said that Catholic and Lutheran teachings concerning
Christ are “the same,” being merely a matter of “Catholic language”
versus “Lutheran language.” You characterized the defined dogma and
ontological reality of transubstantiation as mere “explanations and
interpretations,” declaring that “life is greater than explanations and
interpretations”—as if “life” were “greater” than the Real Presence of
God Incarnate in the Holy Eucharist, which Protestants deny.
On the same occasion you suggested that whether Protestants can receive
Holy Communion is for theologians to determine, when the Church has
already infallibly determined that this is impossible without
conversion and profession of the same faith as Catholics. Stating that
the matter was beyond your “competence”—but it is precisely the Pope’s
competence to uphold the Church’s teaching in this regard—you suggested
that a Lutheran married to a Catholic might receive Holy Communion
after “speaking to the Lord” but that you “dare not say more.” But you
had already said far too much by publicly referring a matter of grave
importance for salvation to the error-prone private conscience of the
individual: “he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and
drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord (1
Cor. 11:29).”
On November 21, you declared to a worldwide conference of Catholic
educators: “Never proselytize in
schools. Christian education is bringing up the young in
complete reality with human values and
one of these is transcendence.”
On the contrary, Catholic education is above all an inculcation in
divine values: The Gospel and
what it requires of Catholics, indeed the
whole world, not merely human values or a vague “transcendence” bereft
of its proper object, which is the God who has revealed Himself in the
person of Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate.
During your trip to Africa, November 25-30, you opined that the world
is “at the limits of suicide” because of “climate change.” As you have
throughout your pontificate, you failed to address the true threat of
civilizational suicide in our time, remarked by your great predecessor,
Venerable Pope Pius XII: that “almost
the whole human race is today allowing itself to be driven into two
opposing camps, for Christ or against Christ. The human race is
involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue in its salvation
by Christ, or in its dire destruction.” By constantly directing
the attention of the entire Church to a worldly “ecological crisis,”
you cause the faithful to lose sight of the Christological crisis that
threatens the eternal welfare of countless souls in our time.
During the in-flight press conference on the return to Rome from
Africa, you denounced “fundamentalist” Catholics yet again, mocking the
absolute religious convictions of orthodox members of your flock, based
on the revealed word of God and the infallible teaching of the
Magisterium on faith and morals:
Fundamentalism is a sickness that is in
all religions…. We Catholics
have some—and not some, many, eh?
—who believe they possess the absolute truth (che si credonono con la verita assoluta)
and go ahead dirtying others with calumny, with disinformation, and
they do evil…. Religious fundamentalism is not religious, because it
lacks God and it is idolatrous, like the idolatry of money.
Having denounced “many” members of your own flock as godless idolaters,
you later suggested a moral equivalence between Christians and the
Muslim fanatics who are slaughtering, torturing, raping, enslaving and
exiling Christians around the world: “You cannot wipe out a religion
just because there are some or a number of groups of fundamentalists at
one moment in history…. Think of all the wars we Christians have waged. It
wasn’t the Muslims who were responsible for the Sack of Rome.”
Yet again you embarrass the Church—and yourself—with an ill-considered
remark quite unbecoming the Roman Pontiff. The historical record
demands correction of your blunder:
First of all, the Muslims did sack Rome in 846, looting old Saint
Peter’s and prompting Pope Leo IV to build the “Leonine walls” “to
defend the see of Peter from an Islamic jihad.”
Secondly, if you were referring to the sack of Rome in 1527 by the army
of Emperor Charles V, this had nothing to do with religious
“fundamentalism” but rather involved purely political retaliation
against Clement VII, a weak and vacillating Pope, who had improvidently
forged an alliance with the King of France (Francis I) with whom
Charles was at war. In fact, the Emperor’s army included German
mercenaries, most of whom were
Lutherans, and it was they who were principally responsible for
the depredation of the Holy City and the violence done to its Catholic
inhabitants.
Thirdly, during the same era, of course, Muslim marauders—who were
indeed violent “fundamentalists”—were expanding the Ottoman Empire by
the conquest of Christian lands until the resounding and miraculous
defeat of the Muslim fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which
prevented a Muslim conquest of all of Europe and probably another
Muslim sack of Rome.
Provoking still more scandal, in answer to a question concerning
whether the Church should “change its position” on the immorality of
contraception to permit the use of condoms as a method of limiting new
HIV infections, you referred to this evil practice as “one of the
methods,” thus appearing to legitimize it, while suggesting that it
presents a moral dilemma for the Church, even likening it to Our Lord healing on
the Sabbath:
The question seems too small to me, it
also seems to me a partial question. Yes, it is one of the methods. And the
morality of the Church, finds itself, I think, on this point before a
perplexity. So, the Fifth or the Sixth Commandment? Defend life [with
condoms!], or that sexual relations be open to life? But this is not
the problem. The problem is bigger.
This question makes me think of one they once asked Jesus: “Tell me,
teacher, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” It is obligatory to heal…. [B]ut
malnutrition, the development of the person, slave labor, the lack of
potable drinking water, these are the problems. Let’s not talk about if
one can use this type of Band-Aid [cerotto]
or that for a small wound, the
big wound is social
injustice, environmental injustice….
Thus, you appeared to accept that there is room for consideration of
this “method,” although you view it as a rather trivial matter (a
Band-Aid) even though it facilitates fornication and a culture of total
sexual depravity. You then subordinated the moral law to concern for
social and environmental justice! And so, once again, the Church is
wounded by scandal and confusion on account of your habit of careless,
off-the-cuff remarks to the press on weighty moral and theological
questions concerning which a pope should speak or write with utmost
prudence and deliberation, invoking the divine assistance.
Finally, there has just appeared on the Vatican website an interview of
Your Holiness by the weekly Credere in
which you allude favorably (yet
again) to Cardinal Kasper’s false notion “mercy” and reveal that you
intend to conduct a “revolution of tenderness”—an allusion to the title
of Cardinal Kasper’s book lauding you: Pope Francis’ Revolution of Tenderness and
Love. You declare that this “revolution of tenderness” will
take place during your Jubilee of Mercy, which will involve “so many
gestures,” including “a different gesture” on “a Friday of every month.”
Your stated motive for the “revolution of tenderness” is that,
according to you, “the Church herself sometimes follows a hard line,
she falls into the temptation of following a hard line, into the
temptation of stressing only the moral rules, many people are excluded.”
Affirming your interviewer’s suggestion that the Church must “discover”
a “God who is moved and has compassion for man,” you reply: “To
discover it will lead us to have a more tolerant, more patient, more
tender attitude”—as if the Church were lacking in patience and
compassion for sinners before your election.
What are these astounding affirmations if not an absolutely
unprecedented threat by a Roman Pontiff to disregard “moral rules”—that
is, the constant teaching of the infallible Magisterium—in the name of
a false mercy, evidently with regard to the divorced and “remarried”
and others you deem “excluded” in some manner? What are we to make of a
pope who claims that the Church that Christ founded to teach infallibly
on faith and morals has “fallen” into a temptation to take a “hard line”
on morality? What besides horror should the faithful experience when a
pope says such things, which have never been heard from the See of
Peter in 2,000 years?
Catholics know that a true revolution of tenderness occurs in every
soul that undergoes Baptism or, corresponding to the grace of
repentance, enters the confessional with a firm purpose of amendment
and a contrite heart, unburdens the weight of sin, receives absolution
by a priest acting in persona
Christi, and emerges “white as snow,” to
quote your own predecessor, speaking of the Sacrament of Confession.
The Catholic Church has always been an inexhaustible font of divine
mercy through her Sacraments. What can your proposed “revolution” add
to what Christ has already provided in His Church? Can you declare an
amnesty on mortal sin? Can you pardon what is not pardonable without
repentance and contrition? Can you outdo the mercy of God Himself?
The perception grows daily that although you are the Vicar of Christ,
you simply have no interest in defending faith and morals, which are
under attack as never before, nor any intention to call the wandering
sheep into the sheepfold Our Lord established for their salvation. On
the contrary, you appear to have devoted your pontificate to a
veritable program of doctrinal and disciplinary laxity whose theme is
the regular denunciation of orthodox Catholics combined with
accusations that the Church lacks mercy. At the same time, you pursue
social and political matters in which a pope has no competence or
authority, such as “climate change,” environmentalism, and restoring
diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.
After being
buffeted by one storm of controversy after another occasioned by your
unprecedented words and deeds, the faithful feel increasingly as if
“the ship of the Church has lost its compass.”
In sum, Holy Father, over the past two-and-a-half years you have earned
the world’s unanimous praise while throwing the ecclesiastical
commonwealth into a state of confusion and division. You have
ridiculed, berated and condemned the orthodox, shown limitless
tolerance for the heterodox and the sexually deviant, and contrived to
subvert the sacramental discipline defended by the very Pope you
declared a saint. Accompanied everywhere by the adulation of the media
and the roar of crowds, you seem heedless of Our Lord’s admonition:
“Woe to you when men shall bless you: for according to these things did
their fathers to the false prophets.”
The situation has reached the point where a senior Vatican official,
reflecting the concerns of Catholics of all ranks, was constrained to
warn a world-renowned Catholic journalist that “This pontificate poses
serious risks for the integrity of Catholic teaching in faith and
morals.”
In agreement with this prelate, we are compelled before God publicly to
declare in conscience that your pontificate can only be seen as a clear
and present danger to the Church, a danger that seems to increase with
each passing day. Indeed, the damaging effects of your pontificate are
everywhere in evidence, with Catholics throughout the world now
treating more and more dismissively the Church’s teachings on faith and
morals, taking as their point of reference your own words and
deeds—jubilantly trumpeted to the world by the media—rather than the
infallible teaching of the Magisterium on faith and morals over the
past 2,000 years.
Now, as you condemn the Church’s “hard line” on “moral rules” and
proclaim a “revolution of tenderness,” we are faced with the imminent
threat of unheard-of “gestures” of “mercy” that would undermine the
moral edifice of the Church to the great harm of souls, whose salvation
is at stake. Among these gestures would appear to be a post-synodal
apostolic exhortation authorizing the admission of public adulterers to
Holy Communion according to the judgment of individual bishops or
episcopal conferences. This would mean nothing less than mass
sacrilege, the practical destruction of the Church’s unity, the de facto abolition of the doctrine
on mortal sin and the requirement of the state of grace for a
sacramental life, the collapse of the Church’s moral teaching, and
ultimately a surrender of her very claim to an infallible Magisterium.
One has the sense of a nearly apocalyptic turn of events in the history
of the Church.
We dare not judge your subjective motives or intentions concerning what
you have said and done to the Church’s detriment in the course of a
turbulent pontificate unlike any the Church has ever seen. But we
cannot remain silent in the face of the objective harm the Church has
already sustained, to the world’s endless praise for “the people’s
pope,” or the further harm that now appears imminent.
To recall once again the words of your predecessor, a pope must
exercise his power to “bind himself and the Church to obedience to
God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down,
and every form of opportunism.” When a pope is unable or unwilling to
pursue that end, when in fact he seems determined to act against it,
would the Church not be better served if he relinquished the most
august office of Vicar of Christ? Better this than to risk a fatal
compromise of the Church’s doctrine and discipline, subverting 2,000
years of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition and incurring, to quote
the famous formula employed by Pope Saint Pius V, “the wrath of
Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”
December 8, 2015
Feast of the Immaculate Conception
NOTES
(1) Source
at the Remnant
The M+G+R Foundation
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