Recently, I was reading a commentary on the long history of concern about Cardinal McCarrick's liaisons with seminarians and young priests. The progressive writer of the article said that it was the ultra-orthodox in the Church who have been sounding the alarm for a long time over him and no one took them seriously. I might add, too, ultra liberals sounded the alarm too as far back as 2010 in the person of the laicized priest Richard Sipe.
Thus in the same vein, I think that we should take the concerns of the ultra-orthodox about the direction of the Church since Vatican II seriously. I prefer Pope Benedict's concerns as His Holiness expressed it so well in his Christmas address to cardinals early in his papacy. He wanted the Church to be Catholic and to have renewal in continuity with what preceded Vatican II, not a rupture, which in fact we have experienced for well over 50 years now which has led to a loss of lay Catholic identity, priestly identity and religious identity, each category loosing members, bleeding member and gaining fewer for the past 50 years or so.
Andrea Tornielli is a great supporter of Pope Francis and the papacy as all Catholics should be. However, we do not need to be blind to problems in any papacy or in the Church since Vatican II cause by a misinterpretation of that Council that has led to the decline of the Catholic Church and her members identity for well over 50 years.
Here is Tornielli's article:
Livi’s anathema: “Heretics and wicked men are in power in the Church”
An interview with the dogmatic theologian confirms that many critics
of the current pontificate are in fact critics of the entire
post-conciliar Church and its Popes, from Roncalli to Bergoglio
, lastampa
andrea tornielli
vatican city
“
For more than fifty years heretical, evil theologians have tried to conquer power, and now they have succeeded. That
is why I speak of heresy in power”. Monsignor Antonio Livi, a dogmatic
theologian at the Pontifical Lateran University, signatory of the “
correctio filialis”
addressed to Pope Francis, must be acknowledged for knowing how to
speak clearly. The video interview granted in Italian on 2 May 2018 to
the magazine “The Wanderer” was transcribed and published in the
“Courrier de Rome” n° 611 of June 2018. It is a
noteworthy interview, in which the theologian calls himself “persecuted” (Catholic bookshops do not sell the magazine he directs)
because it allows us to understand the nature of the deepest criticisms
of the current pontificate and reveals once again how they originate
from a shared critique of all the Popes of the Council and of the
post-conciliar period. The interpretative skirmishes on
Amoris laetitia or on the dubious affirmations attributed to Francis by some illustrious interviewer give the pace of what is going on,
making room for the emergence of a deeper and more radical fringe of dissent, which calls into question Vatican II and all the successors of Peter who have called it, led it, carried it out and applied it.
In the first two answers of the interview, Livi speaks about the election of Francis defining it as “
orchestrated”. To the question of why the Pope does not realize that his pastoral work “leads to a dying Church”, the theologian answers:
“Because
he was elected precisely for this reason. He (Francis) himself said:
“My brother cardinals have elected me to take care of the poor and to
carry out the reform”. In fact, it was the group of theologians
of St. Gallen, Switzerland, Godfried Danneels, Walter Kasper and others,
who - already on the occasion of Benedict XVI’s election - thought
that the Pope who could advance reform in the Church, in the Lutheran
sense of the term, could be Bergoglio”.
According to
Livi, Bergoglio would like “a Church without priesthood, a Church
without magisterium, a Church without dogmas, a Church without an
official interpretation of Sacred Scripture, left in the hands of people
who interpret it according to the presumed spirit, that it suggests to
them”.
So Livi, about the conclave, says he is “absolutely sure” that the election of Francis was “orchestrated”.
For the monsignor “it is an historical certainty.
Historical certainties have always been based on testimonies” and on
the fact that “no one has put forward a different argument”. “If I
think of Cardinal Kasper who was already heretical and wished to
destroy the Holy Mass, marriage, communion and canon law, and how now
the Pope says that he is his theologian par excellence and makes him
organize the Synod for the family, I say to myself: something has been
totally orchestrated”. And again: “You understand that this is a very
well-orchestrated plan, which has not started today, but since the
beginning of the sixties.
For more than fifty years
heretical, evil theologians have tried to gain power, and now they have
succeeded. That is why I am talking about heresy in power. It
is not the popes who are heretics; I have never said this of any Pope.
The Popes have suffered this influence and have not opposed it. They
followed John XXIII’s crazy idea who said: “Let us affirm the
doctrine of all time, but without condemning anyone”. This is
impossible; condemnation is part of the explanation of dogma”.
Leaving aside the accusation of heresy towards Walter Kasper,
pronounced with iron certainty by Livi (we shall remember that Kasper is
a bishop and a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, elected and created
by Saint John Paul II who maintained his position with Benedict XVI
and that his writings were never the object of public censorship by the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), t
he certainty about the “orchestrated” conclave appears very weak from the historical point of view.
What does it mean to “orchestrate” an election? That there are
cardinals who speak among themselves about who they consider the best
candidate, as always happened before and during every pontifical
election? For centuries, the Church has established that the Pope cannot
be elected from one side, but that a majority of two thirds of the
votes is always necessary.
A look at the history of the last century shows how four papal elections took place in just 24 hours,
therefore considerably fast and with the consent of the overwhelming majority of voters around a candidate.
The most rapid conclaves of the last hundred years were those of Pius
XII (1939), John Paul I (1978), Benedict XVI (2005) and Francis (2013):
shall they be considered “orchestrated”, given their surprising
rapidity? If the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is to be considered
“orchestrated” because a small group of cardinals decided to focus on
him before the doors of the Sistine Chapel closed, the same must be said
- at the very least - for all the previous lightning-fast conclaves.
Unless one thinks that in 2005, for example, the cardinals gathered
without ever having exchanged ideas with each other and suddenly,
instigated by the Holy Spirit, more than two thirds of them wrote
“Joseph Ratzinger” on the card.
On the subject of “heresy in power”, Monsignor Livi specifies:
“I
refer not to people who formally profess heresy, because if it were
ecclesiastical authorities they would all be excommunicated and lose
their role, but to heresies who are professed formally and insistently
by theologians who had much power at the beginning of the Second Vatican
Council, thanks to or because of John XXIII, and then in the
post-conciliar period, for all the popes continued to treat these
heretical theologians with respect. Some of them, like Benedict XVI,
both as Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith and as Pope,
maintained an Orthodox and pious position in adoration of God and
respect for the sacredness of the Incarnation, but in the end, they too
were effectively united with these heretical theologians. When Benedict
XVI, as Pope, speaks of Karl Rahner, he simply says that both agreed to
help the bishops lead the Council towards a certain direction, a
horrible direction, and only later did they separate only by certain
disagreements”. It won’t go unnoticed that according to Livi, from Pope
John to Pope Ratzinger, all the Popes share “heretical” theologians.
The former theologian teacher of the Lateran criticizes Benedict XVI
as follows: “I am an expert in logic and I can only examine a
proposition, a method, and in this I say things that are absolutely true
and indisputable. When I criticize the heresy tendencies of Benedict
XVI, I do not ignore that he is a saint and that he has done many good
things in pastoral work for the Church and that he has always had good
intentions.
But this does not detract from the fact
that he has always shown sympathy for neo-modernism, which basically
consists of two things: ignoring metaphysics and wanting to explain
dogma with hermeneutical criteria based on existentialism and
phenomenology. Pope Ratzinger sympathetic with neo-modernism, he too would fail to defend the dogma.
For Livi “since after John XXIII, the idea has
been that the pastoral ministry of the Church consists in translating
dogma into an understandable language, acceptable to modern man - which
is a myth, a fantasy - and in finding good even in the
theoretical positions most contrary to dogma. I believe that this is a
pastoral ministry which, as such, is erroneous and harmful to the
Church”. The theologian adds that he does not consider Joseph
Ratzinger’s theology a “way out of the crisis of the Church”, “because
of what I have already said. Already in the “Introduction to
Christianity”, he demonstrated a Catholic culture under the influence of
Protestant culture, and in theology he already acted on the basis of
the choice to fight neo-Thomism and Neo-Scholasticism, with their
preambula fidei and natural theology”.
According to Livi, Benedict XVI “produced documents that derive more
from theology than from the Magisterium. If we do theology and put our
work on the same level as that of theologians, we no longer do the
Magisterium, which consists in proposing the dogma again and explaining
it. His encyclicals are 90% pure theology”.
The dogmatic theologian also criticizes Pope
Ratzinger’s invitation to the non-believers, so that they may live “as
if God existed”. “With the greatest respect for Cardinal
Ratzinger - who later repeated the same thing as Pope - it is nonsense.
The existence of God cannot be presented to men as if it were a
hypothesis. This is just fideism”.
Precisely this point allows Livi to express his thought on a crucial question:
“those
who admit the hypothesis - both the Pope and the atheists - denies a
truth knowing that it is a truth. No one can convince me that there is
really someone who, apodictically, denies the existence of God. In France, in the 1960s, Étienne Gilson, my teacher, wrote a book,
L’Athéisme difficile,
in which he affirmed that it is impossible for a philosopher to affirm
that God does not exist. The source of world philosophy, which comes
from Greece, starts from the assumption that God exists”. For the former
Lateran professor, “thinking that modern man is atheist is false, it
seems to me. Every man has the certainty that God exists, on the basis
of common sense”. And here lies the origin of the harsh criticism
towards the post-conciliar Church that unites Livi to other exponents of
the so-called traditionalist world: the abandonment of
Neo-Scholasticism, thanks to which - the theologian seems to want to
affirm - it could by “proved” to anyone that God exists thanks to
reasoning, because “for a philosopher”, as the interviewee himself is,
“it is impossible to affirm that God does not exist”.
Livi seems not to want to understand that what he hastily described
as “neo-modernism”, grouping theologians and Popes in a single bundle,
represents instead an attempt to answer the dramatic question of how the
Gospel is announced in a society that begins to live as if God did not
exist. It is this question that lies at the basis of the Council, of the
updating wanted by John XXIII, of the intense dialogue with the world
wanted by Paul VI and continued by his successors.
As
Benedict XVI stated in his speech to the bishops of Portugal (Fatima,
13 May 2010): “ when, in the view of many people, the Catholic faith is
no longer the common patrimony of society and, often, seen as seed
threatened and obscured by the “gods” and masters of this world, only
with great difficulty can the faith touch the hearts of people by means
simple speeches or moral appeals, and even less by a general appeal to
Christian values. The courageous and integral appeal to principles is
essential and indispensable; yet simply proclaiming the message does not
penetrate to the depths of people’s hearts, it does not touch their
freedom, it does not change their lives. What attracts is, above all,
the encounter with believing persons who, through their faith, draw
others to the grace of Christ by bearing witness to him”.
Philosophical reasoning and logical demonstrations, however crystalline
and pronounced by a strictly Neo-Thomist professor of dogmatics, are not
enough. Today, in a “liquid” and de-Christianized society, they are not
enough, but in the final analysis they were not enough two hundred or
two thousand years ago. The dynamic that emerges from the Gospels is in
fact something else.
“ Being Christian is not the result of an ethical
choice or a lofty idea - Benedict XVI wrote at the beginning of the
encyclical Deus caritas est - but the encounter with an event, a person,
which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction”. Christianity,
he had specified in the funeral homily for Don Luigi Giussani, “is not
an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism.
Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event”.
A final consideration, at last, about the “persecution” of which Livi
claims to be victim: “It is going from worse to worse; and this
persecution is justified by certain imprudent statements of the current
Pope. All those who are faithful to doctrine, to canon law, and want the
certainties of faith not to be set aside, are openly accused of
heresy”.
Apart from the fact that it is only Livi who accuses others of heresy
, perhaps greater caution in the words to be used would be desirable:
at a time when many Christians are suffering and are truly persecuted
and often killed in hatred of the faith, talking about “persecution”
because some bookshops refuse to showcase your magazines sounds a bit
excessive.
