THE TAOS TATLER.

The more barbarous their cause, the more sanctimonious they become. Quite a feat, in a way.

From Forbes:

President Joe Biden said Sunday he has asked his staff to see if he “has the authority” to declare a public health emergency to address abortion access, a move that could release additional funding and give federal health officials more power to respond to state-level abortion restrictions, following calls from progressive Democrats to take sweeping action to protect abortion rights after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Only in 21st-Century America would putatively enlightened Democrat leaders consider too many unborn babies coming to term a “public health emergency.” 1984 was long ago but doublethink not only thrives but prospers.

One fine day, when there is a real pope in the Vatican (please, no accusations of sedevacantism–yet, anyway), he will stand up to the likes of our president and Congresswoman Pelosi, who speak out of both sides of their mouths when they simultaneously proclaim their Catholicism and their enthusiastic support of unrestricted abortion. If a supreme pontiff were simply to call out these hypocrites by name, sharply addressing them for their promotion of a monstrous sin (it wouldn’t hurt to excommunicate them too, but we’re trying to be realistic), this crank at least believes it would provide a huge boost to Catholics and non-Catholics alike striving to end the slaughter of the innocents in the womb.

Oremus.

Atoning for whiteness.

No such bourgeois silliness as having God in her life or believing in sin, but only that of being white, and by golly she feels just terrible about it. What to do, what to do? How to express requisite meae maximae culpae?

Mortification of the flesh is out–it hurts!–but some form of punishment to self is in order, a sort of self-flagellation-lite. And behold! The dame has found oh-so-easy penance by holding up a poster in the public square proclaiming not only does she as a white person suck, but, in the spirit of collectivism, all white people suck.

A thought crosses the mind though. Do whites claiming victim status, e.g., those who identify as LGBTQI+, suck as well?Perhaps do they suck less? Does there exist a proportional measure of victimhood to suckness? Or is it more complicated, with sufficient variables requiring calculus to determine the exact degree how much, say, a white, but BIPOC pederast sucks in contrast with a straight white Catholic Marine, married with children? Or could it even be a blond, blue-eyed male Skowegian is free from the stain of whiteness so long as there’s a strain of victimhood in his mix?

All food for thought the above, but for the nonce let us empathize with the lady above as she acknowledges and bewails her manifold sins and wickedness of being white. May she at last find peace, at least until tomorrow and she’s out there again.

.

… nonetheless is still black.

Via PJ Media comes word liberal éminence grise, Jonathan Alter, writing in the New York Times, has thrown President Biden to the wolves; the slew of secret documents that keep popping up all over the place, he writes, ” torpedoes the faux president’s chances of reelection and that these events have damaged his (get ready for this) “core political brand of honor and decency.”

Disregarding the second claim of Alter’s, he also omits the real reason why dopey Joe’s reelection bid has been scuttled by his actions. By committing the same offense for which Donald Trump is being hammered (in fact it’s worse, unlike Trump he wasn’t president at the time), a powerful campaign issue has been snatched away from the Democrats.

It would have been much to Biden’s advantage had his administration not made such a royal stink over Trump’s doings, i. e., siccing the Justice Department, from the Attorney General on down, on the former president. If they had been reasonably sane dealing with Trump, when reports were first coming out Biden had done something similar, his administration, with the assistance of a compliant media, could easily have “disappeared’ the matter and it would have been forgotten in a short time. Now though Republicans have a splendid tu quoque defense to throw right back at Trump’s accusers every time the matter is raised.

Logicians will insist, and Democrats will loudly parrot them, tu quoque is a logical fallacy and not a legitimate form of argument. To which the only logical response is, tell that to the voters.

UPDATE: Oops, they just discovered six more.

To assure variety for the whiny poor dear, the organizers of this event should vary the cuisine: not just beef, but lamb, goat, oxen, pork, poultry, and if she’s a seafood hater, lobster.

On the other hand, perhaps a taste of her own medicine might prove beneficial. In addition to real food, throw on the barbie quinoa, sorghum, teff, and anything else those people like to eat (with a generous chaser of self-righteousness). Make sure there are plenty of fans to aim the fumes from the friendly fire, as it were, right back at her.

Either way, the Church is stuck with him.

From the Catholic Herald:

Priests should grant absolution in the confessional even when the penitent has no intention to repent, the Pope has said in a speech which has shocked seminarians…

In his address, he ordered students for the priesthood ‘not to be clerical, to forgive everything,’ adding that ‘if we see that there is no intention to repent, we must forgive all…’

Priests who deny penitents absolution are ‘delinquents,’ the Pontiff said, according to the Church Militant website…

If accurate, the Pope’s remarks appear to put him at odds with the moral theology expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which emphasises that contrition occupies the ‘first place’ of any act of a penitent and that it involves ‘the resolution not to sin again.’

Here the story gets downright bizarre.

According to reports, Francis also used his speech to rant against “f***ing careerists who f*** up the lives of others”.

The Pope also criticised “those who climb to show their a**”, the Italian media outlet Daily Compass reported. 

According to the Jesuits, there is no mechanism by which an incompetent pope may be removed.

Canon 335 of the present Code of Canon Law directs that special laws are to be followed if the Apostolic See becomes vacant or impeded. Although John Paul II issued new rules in 1996 for dealing with a vacancy, there are still no special laws governing what to do if the Apostolic See becomes impeded. This is a rather serious vacuum in the church’s constitutional law.

No kidding. Who knows how much damage Francis will inflict upon the Holy Catholic Church before he is called to his maker? He has already harshly disparaged observant Catholics preferring traditional worship, accusing them of promoting disunity and  making it clear by the language he uses he despises them. He has also made it vastly more difficult for the traditional Latin mass to be celebrated. What additional damage he manages to effect is anyone’s guess, but this writer does not intend to be around to see it.

Thanks to WJT.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/075867f6-95d1-11ed-a130-baced48eb788?shareToken=215f359793d3e9ec89a991c89c1dcf8b

The Synod on Synodality: the Catholic Church heading down a well-worn and familiar path.

Read below the words of Hugh Hunter, a former Anglican, now a Catholic, who in the pages of Crisis Magazine writes about the late Cardinal Pell’s attack on Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality, drawing some appalling parallels between the Synod and the sad history of the Anglican Church.

Hunter posts a link to a Vatican-issued document summarizing what has transpired thus far in the Synod. He suggests the late Cardinal Pell’s scathing critique of the Synod, which he called a “toxic nightmare,” published in The Spectator just after his death, was his last gift to the Catholic Church. Perhaps so, and though this writer believes it is likely too little, too late, it’s well worth reading both the Cardinal’s and Hunter’s critiques in their entirety.

Before considering Hunter’s going over of the depressing content of the Pope’s summary, let’s have a look at the way the its presented. It begins thus, with scripture.

Crayon, digital crayon, as if it were a children’s book. The Pope’s recurring theme is the “big tent.” (there are digital crayon rendering of tents throughout, for example, this one.

Francis’s point is the Church is a tent that should be greatly enlarged so as include people of all walks of life, the unbaptized, atheists, heterodox, you name it, without the Church making any efforts to bring them and their beliefs into accord with Catholic teachings. Essentially, it’s: “Whatever you think is okay, no demands from us, perish the thought. No one is excluded.”

Hunter writes:

This idea for filling the pews will be familiar, Pell wrote, to ex-Anglicans. As a convert from Anglicanism myself, I can tell you that he’s right. I remember it growing up, because I watched it play out in almost every church I attended. We were going to show everyone that they would be accepted at church. No longer would we be gatekeepers! And so we threw open the doors…and no one came. 

Of course, they didn’t, why should they have? If zero demands were made of them, what were these potentials possibly to gain?

Hunter continues.

And then we started second guessing. Maybe we were gatekeepers after all. Was the music too old-fashioned? Was the language of the liturgy too hard? Were the homilies too serious? Were teachings on suicide or divorce or abortion or homosexuality putting people off? Were we leaving out popular victim groups that we could shoehorn into the faith? 

The mere fact that someone could identify a potential hindrance became a reason to abolish the thing or leave it, to quote Pell, “parked in a pluralist limbo where some choose to redefine sins downwards and most agree to differ respectfully.” Soon the churches of my youth would find they had compromised on so many things that they had changed beyond recognition, except in one respect: they were still empty. 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

Hunter continues.

We’re trying to build a tent big enough to accommodate everybody. But the pluralist says you don’t need to pick a tent. No matter what tent you pick, we all end up at the same place. Come and go between tents as much as you like. Sample Wicca, try astrology, it really doesn’t matter. You don’t even need a tent. You are fine where you are. 

Hugh Hunter witnessed the all-but-demise of the Episcopal Church. So did I. Pope Francis is leading the Holy Catholic Church to the same dismal fate, but I refuse to witness the rerun. I have had enough. I am off–East.

An eerily prescient novel well worthy of our attention today.

With the continual barrage of dark and depressing news issuing from Rome, Washington, D. C., and elsewhere these days, it is difficult to avoid making comparisons of the present state of things and where we are headed, in this country and much of the west, with the dystopian realm of the Antichrist in Robert Hugh Benson’s masterpiece, The Lord of the World.

Benson, an Anglican priest who was received into the Catholic Church and later ordained, wrote this work in reaction to H. G. Wells’s strong support and belief that atheism, Marxism, and eugenics were the keys to paradise on earth. A century later, we can see who called it correctly, though our sages in government, academe, and lately in commerce, don’t seem to have learned a thing.

On the flyleaf of the edition this writer owns, it mentions The Lord of the World was a favorite of the late Pope Benedict XVI, which comes as no surprise. What is surprising is the novel is also claimed to be a favorite of Pope Francis. Perhaps so, but it seems to this writer he regards it less as a novel and more as a how-to guide.

The death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI marks the beginning of dark times for traditional Catholics. His successor, Francis, despite frequent and copious praising of his predecessor, before and after his death, has made it clear whatever high regard he may have held for Benedict, it was reserved for him and him alone, not his legions of supporters for whom he displays increasing scorn and contempt. Many lay Catholics enthusiastically embraced Benedict’s “reform of the reforms,” that is, his clamping down on the grossly inappropriate and irreverent practices that spread like cancer following the so-called reforms of Vatican II. Benedict made strides at least limiting, if not eliminating, those practices, some of which bordered on, or even crossed over to, the heretical.

Without question though, Benedict’s greatest reform was permitting Catholics to worship in what is still the official language of Holy Church, Latin, and employing usus antiquior, the ancient rite, its present form dating back to the Council of Trent, 1545-63, but much of it going back to the eighth century. Furthermore, Benedict stipulated that though parishes were not required to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass, or “TLM,” as it is commonly known, if there were sufficient numbers of parishioners who requested it, every effort had to be made to accommodate them.

Even though Benedict did nothing to curb the celebration of Novus Ordo, the modern mass said in the vernacular, other than correcting some abusive practices, this writer believes it was his restoring TLM to contemporary worship that so infuriated the left-wing modernists in the Vatican, whose numbers are far greater than those of the traditionalists, and which made him many enemies. As long as he was pope however there was little they could do to thwart the return of traditional Catholic worship and practices. Even after his resignation, Benedict’s presence, close by in the Vatican, was an inhibiting factor in modernist innovators’s efforts to jettison his reform of the reforms.

Now Benedict is gone and for all intents and purposes, the innovators have free reign from the top down. Pope Francis detests traditionalists, seeing them as disruptors and fomenters working to destroy unity in the Church, not, as we see it, attempting to save our Church from devolving into a synthesis of Unitarianism, humanism, and relativism, with guitars and incense.

Your commentator at this juncture sees little to look forward to in the coming years for the Catholic Church. He is mindful of our Lord’s promise in Matthew 16:18: And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it., but we cannot predict in what form the True Church shall take, nor its locale; whether it will be based in Rome or somewhere else.

The sacraments of the Eastern Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Polish National Church, the Old Catholic Church, and the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) are all considered valid, in light of their unbroken apostolic succession (not so for the Anglican Church). Will we see one of those institutions rise to take the place of the Catholic Church fallen into heresy? (It seems unlikely it will be the Old Catholic Church which is already a heretical stew pot.) Another possibility might be the Armenian Apostolic Church, which predates slightly the Catholic Church. Even though the latter does not recognize the former’s sacraments, the former does so the latter’s and its worship and beliefs are sound, and though it does permit divorce, it is only for adultery and apostasy.

So whither we go? Your correspondent  hasn’t the foggiest notion at this point, so probably the best course is to stay where we are, await further developments, and pray.

UPDATE:

Professor William J. Tighe comments.

For my part, I would have written:

“The sacraments of the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Polish National Catholic Church and its ‘Union of Scranton’ affiliates in Norway and elsewhere, and the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) are all considered valid.”
The “Oriental Orthodox are those churches – Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian (and the latter’s offshoots in South India – that reject the Council of Chalcedon. And if by “the Old Catholic Church” you mean the Union of Utrecht Old Catholics, well, they have outdone the Anglicans (with whom they are in full communion) in liberalism over the past 25 years, and I would have omitted them from the list.

Quite so, but we’ll let the original stand so readers may see the difference between an Internet scholar and the real thing.

Of course, the Old Catholics should have been excised from the list, but that would have denied the pleasure of describing them as a”stew pot of heresies,” a metaphor this writer found pleasing.