Posted on 02/28/2017 4:31:45 AM PST by BlessedBeGod
It made news in recent days and for some was a scandal when a glowing eulogy was given in memory of Marco Pannella (1930-2016) by Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, a prominent member of the Community of Sant’Egidio, former president of the pontifical council for the family, and as of a few months ago the president of the pontifical academy for life, as well as being the chancellor for the pontifical John Paul II institute for studies on marriage and family.
It was precisely life and the family, in effect, that were the battlefield of political action for Pannella, a leader of the radical party and a relentless promoter of abortion, divorce, homosexual marriage, and euthanasia.
But this did not stop Pope Francis from praising as “among the greats of Italy today,” in an interview last year, Pannella’s most active comrade in arms, the honorable Emma Bonino, for her commitment to the issue of migration. Just as he did not prohibit Fr. Federico Lombardi from bearing witness to the “highest admiration for Francis” of Pannella himself, an admiration reciprocated by the pope, for efforts on behalf of the incarcerated.
Paglia, therefore, is deliberately following in Francis’s footsteps. Exactly as he is doing in the institutes he oversees, which the pope has not by coincidence entrusted to him.
Settimo Cielo has already covered the news, back when it came out, of the new statutes of the pontifical academy for life that went into effect on January 1, carefully crafted to facilitate the purging of members not in line with the new course, as for example cardinals Carlo Caffarra and Willem Jacobus Eijk, or the renowned scholars Josef Maria Seifert and Luke Gormally.
But now it can be said that the purge is complete. If one goes to the official website of the academy and looks at the three lists of ordinary, corresponding, and emeritus members, one will find that no one appears on them anymore. Absolutely nobody. To find the names of those purged one has to consult the two lists of “former,” with 172, and “late,” with 10.
In other words: everyone fired or buried. And without the slightest forewarning. Not a memo. not an e-mail, not a thank you, not a requiem.
And the new academics who will take the places of the purged? The casting call is already underway, with supervision at Casa Santa Marta, but it will take time. The academy’s own website candidly confesses this, in justifying the delay until October 5-7 of the general assembly that is usually held at the beginning of the year:
"Just for the complexity of the process of appointing new Members of the Academy, made necessary with the approval of the new Statute desired by Pope Francis, the Assembly, will be held next October."
But there’s more. The members-only assembly is always accompanied by a public conference, which for this year had been planned to focus on “Donum Vitae,” the instruction of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith on “respect for human life in its origin and on the dignity of procreation” published by then cardinal prefect Joseph Ratzinger with the explicit approval of Pope John Paul II, the thirtieth anniversary of which falls in 2017:
So the conference was supposed to have discussed specific and pressing questions, from medically assisted procreation to the manipulation of human embryos.
But no. The topic of “Donum Vitae” has been cancelled. And it is not very clear what will be discussed in its place, seeing the vagueness of the conference’s new title: “Accompanying Life. New responsibilities in the technological era.”
And the logo adopted for the conference (see above) certainly does not make matters any clearer. It is credited to Andrea Ciucci, a Milanese priest whom Paglia has brought with him to the academy from the former dicastery for the family, as a public relations officer. Being a computer enthusiast, Fr. Ciucci has uploaded a disturbing human face made up of the numbers “1” and “0,” as in the binary code of a computer, when instead the genetic code - if ever there were any interest in alluding to it - is not of two digits but of four letters, for the bases of DNA: “A,” “T,” “C,” and "G" - a blunder immediately noted by experts in the subject.
“Casting Call” or “Casting Couch”?
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