Islam, Catholicism and the Fallout from Low Standards: Derya Little

From yesterday's National Catholic Register:

Every mosque has a fountain in its yard, so that the worshiper can fulfill the requirements of ritual ablutions before entering Allah’s house. There is an order to the washing of hands, face, mouth, nose, neck and the feet. With every action of physical washing, there is an accompanying prayer.

The reverence that starts well before the Muslim enters the Mosque only intensifies once inside. All superfluous and frivolous activities cease, only hushed whispers could be heard. During the prayers, the imam turns to Kaaba with everyone else to genuflect before Allah who is the ultimate master, the unreachable judge...

Catholics, on the other hand, have the Real Presence of Christ in every single church. The Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the One True Triune God. It is unbelievable, because it is miraculous. For almost two millennia, churches attempted to provide a worthy dwelling with beautiful stained glass windows, painstakingly carved statues and breathtaking altars. The goal was to create a timeless atmosphere where Christ’s sacrifice quieted our busy minds and reached our stubborn hearts. We needed the beauty, the labor, the solemnity in the physical world to make our souls receptive. Everything pointed, or should point, to the Eucharist.

That awe and sense wonder that made us fall to our knees in silence diminishes when we decide to make the priest, not Christ, the center of attention and allow everyone to touch the Eucharist. Even the misguided Muslims understand that the one who leads the worship should first and foremost face the One that is worshipped. Centuries ago, they tapped in something we have lost recently...

Read the entire piece by clicking on the link below:

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/dlittle/islam-catholicism-and-the-fallout-from-low-standards

Pope Benedict XVI and the Great Reveal

Posted by The Bones, November 20, 2017:

The election of Pope Francis represents the definitive crossing of the rubricon for the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is temporary, perhaps it is not, but both Amoris Laetitia and Magnum Principium are documents that suggest we have reached a moment of full disclosure, a moment in the Church's history when the Church's slide into irrelevance, of being subsumed into the decaying culture of the once Catholic West is virtually guaranteed. There is no trumpet to announce the surrender of the Catholic Church from false apostles to announce the Church's surrender to the evil forces at work in the world. There will probably be no announcement to this effect. All we will receive as Catholics is mini-announcements. Praise for an abortionist here. A bishop reinventing the Mass there. The invitation of Planned Parenthood to the Vatican here. Such are, I am sure many readers will agree, the announcements of a counter-Church established within the bosom of the bride of Christ.

Read the whole essay by clicking on the link below:

http://thatthebonesyouhavecrushedmaythrill.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/pope-benedict-xvi-and-great-reveal.html

Fr. Nix: TLM Class #3

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/28/tlm-class-3/

Part I The Second World Wars with Victor Davis Hanson

Gregorian chants are a hit at this Nebraska seminary

Anthony Esolen: True Deiversity (Crisis Magazine)

Anthony Esolen writing today at Crisis Magazine:

You could not have, among the Christians of old, some people who still sacrificed to Bacchus and men who still went after boys and women who still procured abortions; that would have been the same old world, with a little perfume. So now we cannot have a diversity that means no more than conformity to the world. Things are clearer than ever. Unity in Christ alone can give the world the diversity it needs.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/true-diversity-in-unity

Fr. Nix Sermon: 24th Sunday after Pentecost

                                                

This sermon is about how to get your kids to heaven in 15 minutes a day.  The featured image is Holy Ghost parish in downtown Denver.  Some families of this parish used the Baltimore Catechism in the 1980s, and it paid off.

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/27/24dpp17/

Fr. Rutler's Weekly: Column November 26, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

November 26th, 2017

A professor told me of two experiences he had when civilization was picking up its pieces after World War II. He was in the crowd when King George VI visited Cambridge University and was greeted with loud cheers. Then, as a U. S. soldier in occupied Japan, he watched as a vast throng became stone silent when the Emperor alighted from the imperial train, all heads bowed and eyes downcast. Hirohito no longer had divine pretensions, but the customary reverence was palpable. The one king embodied the familial aspect of a monarch as father, and the other was a reminder of a ruler transcending the ordinary commerce of life.

  On the Feast of Christ the King, the Church proposes a sovereignty both human and divine: the Holy One who walked the roads of this world as a man among men was at the same time of Heaven, the Supreme Being.

  This mystery stretches the limited intellect, as in the case of Pontius Pilate, who remains a fascinating psychological study, as he tried to figure out if Jesus was a king. Why he posed the question is not clear, and Jesus asked if the question was his own or a reaction to the cynicism of the mob. Pilate was a paramount cynic himself, not a skeptic who doubts whether something is true, but a man who doubts that truth exists at all. That is why Nietzsche, whose only god was selfish power, considered Pilate the only powerful character in the Gospel. But then, it was Nietzsche who said, “I am no man, I am dynamite.” Consistent with his claim, he ended up insane.
 
 Because Pilate was too vindictive even for the Roman imperium, the governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius, removed him from the prefecture of Judea. One theory is that Pilate committed suicide in what is now Vienne in modern France. As for his birth, there is more confusion: possibly Tarragona in Spain, or more implausibly in the Perthshire Highlands of Scotland, or Forchheim in Germany, or most likely in the Abruzzi of Italy. You might say that he was born wherever men refuse to recognize truth when they see it, and destroy themselves when they have walked away from it. The moral chaos is more widespread now than in the academic groves of the classical world, and we see its effect in the campus riots of today and the mental floss of such philosophers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

  This much can be said for Pontius Pilate: He inscribed that sign “King of the Jews” and would not remove it. It may have been sheer irony, the cynicism of a cynic. Or perhaps when he began to roam the hills of exile, he sensed that the ultimate and only choice in life is holiness or madness: “And they will go away to eternal punishment, but the virtuous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).

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Say Goodbye to Hollywood, the Beatles & Bugnini

Fr. Nix Sermon: Superfruit Sunday, November 19, 2017

                                     (St. John Chrysostom & St. Gregory the Wonderworker)

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/19/superfuit-sunday/

FR. Schall on Sad Songs at "The Catholic Thing Blog"

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/11/19/on-sad-songs/

Yet all sad songs have this “remembering Zion” about them, this sense of how things might have been but were not. The Man of Sorrows’ love was and still is rejected by many. He did not abolish sadness. He redeemed us through it. It is not the greatest evil. This awareness of what is at stake is what we learn from listening to the sad songs of our kind, songs from the streams of Babylon to the waltzes danced in Tennessee.

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column, November 19, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

November 19th, 2017

   The Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas has been made a shrine, for the massacre there has left it a hallowed place for mourners. A red rose marks where each of the victims died, and then there is one pink rose. That is for the unborn baby that died in the womb. To the frustration of some, Texas is one of 38 states that recognize an infant in utero as a victim when the mother is assaulted. Federal law also accords legal rights to the unborn in cases of federal and military crimes. A pink rose is at least a tacit acknowledgement that a human life existed before birth, and Catholics know that life is life, with no varying shades. This is one example of how truth prevails despite attempts to obscure it.

   Confusion has also muddled marriage. When marriage is refashioned into an oxymoronic “same-sex marriage,” along with ambiguity about procreation and the permanence of natural marriage, the social order loses interest in it altogether. Even among self-professed Catholics, whose population has increased in the last forty years, there has been a 60% decrease in weddings.

   As the Religious life is a consecrated form of spiritual marriage, opaqueness about such commitment has caused the virtual evaporation of many communities. In the past five years alone, with the exception of communities solid in doctrine, there has been a loss of over seven per cent among women religious, while orders of men declined somewhat less.

   St. John Paul II spoke clearly about priestly charisms, and during his pontificate the number of seminarians worldwide increased from 63,882 to 114,439. The years of Pope Benedict XVI saw the numbers grow to 118, 257. Since then, in a time of confusion in the Church and society as a whole, there has been a consistent global decline. In our own vast archdiocese, of the small handful of recent ordinations none was a native New Yorker.

   Yet often where there is clarity of doctrine and high morale, the picture is bright. In 2015, the most recent year for statistics, there was a 25% increase nationally in ordinations. The archdiocese of St. Louis, with a Catholic population roughly less than a quarter the size of the archdiocese of New York, has considerably more seminarians, and the dioceses of Madison, Wisconsin and Lincoln, Nebraska, relatively small in population, each have about twice as many seminarians as we have in “the capital of the world.”

   In the pro-life movement, on the federal level there are positive developments correcting the anti-life legislation of recent years. And where better instruction is provided, Catholic marriages are becoming more purposeful and stable. Then too, a new generation of young priests sound in doctrine and liturgy is appearing. There is strength in clarity. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” (1 Corinthians 14:8).

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Fr. Nix: How To Pray At The TLM

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/17/meditmass/

Bishop Barron on Reaching the iGens

LUTHER'S POPE: Vatican Stamp of Approval of Protestant Revolt?

Fr. Perricone on The Cassock

Great essay on the priestly Cassock today, by Fr. John A. Perricone, at Crisis Magazine:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/clothing-naked-catholic-square

The priest in the Roman cassock not only represents a divine institution, a legacy of illuminating dogmas, or a prestigious position in a world-respected Church. More grandly, the cassocked priest trumpets to the world a dazzling power: to summon the Word Incarnate upon altars for the salvation of the human race; to literally change the souls of men by uttering the words of absolution. Even while performing works of charity, the priest in the Roman cassock sets himself apart from those doing the same. In cassock, the priest adds a supernatural luster which brings to the work a radiance it did not have before. The habited St Vincent DePaul taking a child in his arms, or the cassocked St. John Bosco playing with his boys, is poetry; a state official, or even a good Catholic doing the same things is prose.

Fr. Schall: Does "Climate Change" Cause Hunger?

Fr. Schall writing today at Crisis Magazine:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/climate-change-cause-hunger

“Climate change” has deftly been substituted for the notorious “earth-warming” theory, the facts of which proved so difficult to sustain on the grounds of evidence about whether warming was or was not actually happening. Thus, whether the temperature goes up or down, it is “climate change”; so we can have an ecological crisis with the temperature going either direction. In grammar school in Iowa in my day, much attention was given to the Ice Age, which had once covered the state and, in fact, was one of the reasons for the richness of its black soil. We left grammar school more concerned about freezing to death than of roasting in some future Iowa desert.

Fr. Nix: Sermon for November 12, 2017

Today at Immaculate Conception Basilica, Jacksonville, Florida.

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/12/23dpp17/

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column: November 12, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column November 12th, 2017

Annals new and old are filled with quotations that most people can recognize. Reaching back, there are Caesar’s “Et tu, Brute?” and Brutus’ own “Sic semper tyrannis.” Preachers recall Saint Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words.” A hymn quotes Francis as saying: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love…” To Voltaire is credited: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Poor Marie Antoinette labors under her “Let them eat cake.” Tediously over-quoted is Churchill’s jibe to Nancy Astor when she said that if he were her husband she would poison his drink: “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.” Along with that is his rather unchivalrous quip to Mrs. Braddock: “I may be drunk, Bessie, but you are ugly, and tomorrow I shall be sober.”    In our national lore, George Washington is quoted as speaking against “entangling alliances,” and Patrick Henry boldly declared: “If this be treason, make the most of it.” Actors recreate Paul Revere’s clarion cry from his horse: “The British are coming!” Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired many: “Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” We smile at Mark Twain saying: “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Soldiers were moved when General Pershing apostrophized:  “Lafayette, we are here!” Charles E. Wilson was mocked for saying: “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Ginger Rogers boasted: “I did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels,” and sportsmen take a motto from Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”    To burst a few bubbles, though, those people never uttered those words. As the inimitable Yogi Berra explained, “I really didn’t say a lot of the things I said.” More problematic than misquoting, is cherry picking actual quotes out of context. Public figures, or their speechwriters, not infrequently affect familiarity with unfamiliar sources. President Kennedy paraphrased a line from Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, and his brother later quoted the same in a campaign speech: “You see things and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’ ” In the play, these fine sounding words in fact were spoken by the serpent in the Garden, fooling Eve.    Dreams may inspire visionaries, but fantasizing about illusions is how the Prince of Lies brought sin and death into the world. Jesus, on the other hand, said, “. . . The words that I speak to you, they are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). Saint John never misquotes the Master: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). Subscribers, Like what you're reading? If so, please consider making a special donation to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel at 424 West 34th Street, so that we can afford to continue distributing the column! If you have Parish Pay, you can also contribute to the column by clicking the button below. Parish Pay

Western Civilization Exists for the Mass: The Liturgy Guy

From Brian Williams  -The Liturgy Guy:

Many are stunned today at the speed in which western civilization is collapsing. Coinciding with this is the post-conciliar crisis within the Church, the fourth great crisis of Christendom as it has been described by that great defender of orthodoxy, Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan. What may not be as clear too many is the connection between the destruction of the Mass and of the collapse of the Christian west.

To read the rest of the essay, click on the below link:

https://liturgyguy.com/2017/11/07/western-civilization-exists-for-the-mass/

HAPPY 242nd BIRTHDAY USMC

On Uniforms

ANATHEMA! Catholic Surrender to Protestant Revolt

From the Remnant Newspaper today.

James Kalb: What "Hate" and "Bigotry" Mean Today

James Kalb, writing today at Crisis Magazine:

What is going on? When did opposition to bigotry become so bigoted, and “hate” lose its connection to hate? How did it happen that pretty much everyone who ever lived now counts as a bigot to be ashamed of? For that matter, when did ordinary Church teaching regarding sex and the sexes, or the value of recognizing and protecting national distinctiveness, become equivalent to crimes against humanity?
At first such views seemed extreme, but more and more they are becoming the conventional wisdom, taught in the schools, proclaimed by moral leaders, assumed as a matter of course in law and public policy, and re-enforced by high and low culture and even by penal sanctions. The transformation is barely noticed, and generally taken for granted as an obvious good thing.

Such a change must have something immensely powerful behind it. But what? It’s a complicated story, but at bottom it has to do with the emerging globalized, technological, and integrated social order in which we live, and the ideals that support that order and the position of those who run it. These ideals present an image of a world reconstituted in accordance with technocratic norms and understandings, a single economic and social network ordered by global markets, certified experts, transnational bureaucracies, electronic entertainment, and electronic communications that make everyone in the world equally present to everyone else. 

In that world, the world of Facebook, Amazon, and global mobility of labor, specific inherited culture loses coherence and function. Men and women become interchangeable economic units. Family is replaced by day care, fast food, and welfare rights. Religion merges into politically correct progressivism. And common sense and the wisdom of the people—the secular equivalent of the Catholic sensus fidei fidelium—are replaced by spin, memes, propaganda, alleged expertise, and commercial pop culture.

To read the entire essay, click on the below link:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/haters-and-haters

Fr. Nix: Sermon for November 5, 2017

Delivered yesterday at Immaculate Conception Basilica, Jacksonville.

http://padreperegrino.org/2017/11/06/22dpp17/

Sundays are for Beauty: Morales, Requiem Introit a 5

Sung by the Wyoming Catholic College Schola Cantorum on All Souls day.

EDWARD PENTIN: Catholic Identity Conference 2017

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column: November 5, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

Sunday, November 5th, 2017.

Celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 was awkward and unlike our nation’s festivities of 1976, because the American Revolution did not have a Reign of Terror. The Russian people are in a situation even more perplexing when it comes to the one-hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7. (The dating confusion is because Russia was still on the old Julian calendar in 1917.) The Russian Revolution unleashed the horrors of Communism that led to the deaths of at least 94 million people in various countries, by genocide, execution, purges and famines caused by collectivization.

   

History is not ardently pursued in our schools these days, and when it is modified as Social Science, it often distorts historical reality. In a survey of youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, twenty-eight per cent had never heard of Lenin, and fully half had never heard of Stalin, while nearly two-thirds were unaware of the existence of history’s worst mass murderer (65 million deaths), Mao Tse-Tung. The death of Fidel Castro was marked by many media commentators as something to be mourned, and Che Guevara appears on t-shirts as a chic hero.

   

In countries at least nominally Christian, the assaults on the Church by revolutionaries took a more subtle form through subversion. There is the witness of Bella Dodd, an organizer of the Communist Party in the United States and head of the New York State Teachers Union. After her return to the Church in 1952 under the guidance of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, she detailed how the Communist Party in the 1920’s and 1930’s strove to infiltrate American seminaries and other church institutions, often through the exploitation of the naïve and what, according to Soviet expert Vladimir Bukovsky, Lenin had called “useful idiots.”

   

There still are Russians old enough to remember seeing priests nailed to the doors of their churches. Their nation remains conflicted about their revolution, and still hesitant about what to do with the repeatedly embalmed corpse of Lenin; but facing his tomb from across the great square, Krásnaya plóshchad, is the Kazan Cathedral, restored in 1993. On its façade is written in bold Cyrillic letters: “Christ is Risen.” Since the “Second Baptism of Russia” when the old Soviet Union fell in 1988, 29,000 churches have been built there, at the rate of three per day. In that period the number of seminaries has increased from three to over fifty.

    

That is a picture far different from many places in the West, where innocuous Christianity has failed to resist the bacillus of secularism, as churches close and seminaries shrink. People who have suffered the consequences of evil in the East have expressions more ponderous and sober than the chuckling countenances of soft spokesmen for Christ in the West. The centenary of the Russian Revolution should be a time for reflection and resolve.

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Fr. Heilman: Combat Rosaries for the White House

From Fr. Heilman's Blog, Roman Catholic Man, October 31, 2017:

COMBAT ROSARIES FOR THE WHITE HOUSE

Silver Combat Rosaries, touched to 165 first-class relics of saints (including a verified piece of the veil of the Blessed Mother), are ready to be sent the White House. These four “touched” Combat Rosaries are going to …

President Donald J. Trump

First Lady Melania Trump

Chief of Staff, General John Kelly

Special Advisor to the President, Kellyanne Conway

These are gifts to them on the First Anniversary of the election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States of America.
On that same day (November 8), many misled Americans will “Scream Helplessly at the Sky” at 6:00pm Central, 7:00pm Eastern.
I am asking all of you to join me in praying a Rosary for President Donald J. Trump at or near 6:00pm Central, 7:00pm Eastern on November 8. We will “Pray Hopefully to Heaven.”

To read the letter sent to President Trump, and the entire post, click on the link below:

https://www.romancatholicman.com/combat-rosaries-white-house/

Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy explains his critical letter to Pope Francis

From The Catholic World Report today:

Editor’s note: Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap., is a highly regarded and accomplished American theologian who is former chief of staff for the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine and a current member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission. His fields of academic specialty include Christology, Trinitarian theology, soteriology, and philosophical notions of God. He has taught at several American universities and for twelve years at the University of Oxford. The author of several books and numerous articles for both academic and popular publications, he is the current President of the Academy of Catholic Theology, and a member of the Catholic Theological Society of America, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, the Catholic Theological Society of Great Britain, the North American Patristics Society, and the Association Internationale D’Etudes Patristiques.

Fr. Weinandy recently made public a three-page letter he had sent to Pope Francis on July 31, 2017. The letter, posted in full below, expresses Fr. Weinandy’s concerns about several aspects of the current pontificate, including the much-debated Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, the Holy Father’s apparent low regard for Church doctrine, and the clear sense that many bishops “fear that if they speak their mind” about their concerns, “they will be marginalized or worse.” 

I spoke for a few minutes this morning with Fr. Weinandy, and he told me that since the letter’s publication, he has received many positive and encouraging notes from theologians, priests, and lay people. However, the USCCB asked him to resign from his current position as consultant to the bishops, and he has submitted his resignation. In making such a request, the USCCB, it would appear, reinforces Fr. Weinandy’s very point about fearfulness and lack of transparency. 

Fr. Weinandy has graciously allowed CWR to publish both his letter and an explanation of how he came to write his letter; both are reprinted in full below.

To read both the letter and the explanation click on the link below:

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/11/01/fr-thomas-g-weinandy-explains-his-critical-letter-to-pope-francis/

Michael Matt Kicks Off Catholic Identity Conference

Branco Cartoon: Unsafe at Any Speed

From Legal Insurrection Blog today.

That theologian, Fr. Weinandy, was asked to resign by the USCCB

Fr. Weinandy, the theologian who sent the letter reproduced in the previous post, was asked to resign his position with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.  What a surprise!  Too bad our bishops can't handle the Truth!

The news was reported tonight by LifeSiteNews.  Here's the link:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-u.s.-bishops-ask-theologian-to-resign-after-letter-criticizing-pop

US Theologian to Pope: Many losing confidence in you

From The Catholic Herald today:

There is a 'growing unease' and 'chronic confusion' around Amoris Laetitia, Fr Thomas Weinandy says 

A member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission has written to Pope Francis saying many Catholics are losing confidence in “their supreme shepherd” due to on-going doctrinal confusions. 

Fr Thomas Weinandy, who is also a former chief of staff for the United States bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, accuses the Pope of fostering a “growing unease” among the faithful by failing to clarify the teaching of Amoris Laetitia. 

“A chronic confusion seems to mark your pontificate,” he writes. “The light of faith, hope, and love is not absent, but too often it is obscured by the ambiguity of your words and actions.” 

“Too often your manner seems to demean the importance of Church doctrine,” he adds. “Again and again you portray doctrine as dead and bookish, and far from the pastoral concerns of everyday life.” 

On Amoris Laetitia, Fr Weinandy writes: “Your guidance at times seems intentionally ambiguous, thus inviting both a traditional interpretation of Catholic teaching on marriage and divorce as well as one that might imply a change in that teaching.” 

“To teach with such a seemingly intentional lack of clarity inevitably risks sinning against the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth,” he adds. 

He accuses Pope Francis of seemly trying to “censor and even mock” people with traditional views on divorce and remarriage by suggesting they are “Pharisaic stone-throwers who embody a merciless rigorism”. 

“This kind of calumny is alien to the nature of the Petrine ministry,” he says. 

Faithful Catholics are also demoralised by the “teaching and practice” of bishops who “seem not merely open to those who hold views counter to Christian belief, but who support and even defend them,” Fr Weinandy says. 

Pope Francis’s pontificate, he adds, has “given those who hold harmful theological and pastoral views the license and confidence to come into the light and expose their previously hidden darkness”. 

Fr Weinandy also criticises Pope Francis’s efforts at decentralisation, saying they are threating (sic) to undermine the Church’s unity. 

“Encouraging a form of ‘synodality’ that allows and promotes various doctrinal and moral options within the Church can only lead to more theological and pastoral confusion.” 

Bishops, he adds, are also too scared to speak out. 

“Bishops are quick learners, and what many have learned from your pontificate is not that you are open to criticism, but that you resent it.” 

In a post on Sandro Magister’s blog, Fr Weinandy says he was inspired to write the letter while praying at the Eucharistic Chapel in St Peter’s in Rome. 

“I was praying about the present state of the Church and the anxieties I had about the present Pontificate. I was beseeching Jesus and Mary, St. Peter and all of the saintly popes who are buried there to do something to rectify the confusion and turmoil within the Church today, a chaos and an uncertainty that I felt Pope Francis had himself caused.” 

He says that he asked God to give him a clear sign that he should write something. That sign turned out to be a chance meeting with an old acquaintance who had since become an archbishop. 

The archbishop said: “Keep up the good writing.” 

Fr Weinandy’s intervention comes just over a month after the publication of the “filial correction”, in which 62 scholars accused the Pope of failing to stop the spread of “heresies and other errors”. Other scholars later added their names to the list of signatories.