Posted on 05/28/2015 7:40:25 PM PDT by annalex
May 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- The prominent German monthly journal, Cicero, a secular-intellectual publication, has entitled its May issue “The Struggle for Rome” (“Der Kampf um Rom”) and has dedicated it to the papacy of Pope Francis. In it, Guiseppe Rusconi, the well-respected Swiss Rome-Correspondent and journalist for Inside the Vatican, reports on the internal criticisms of Pope Francis as they were privately and candidly disclosed to him from within the Roman Curia itself.
Rusconi's revelations caused an immediate stir in Rome, since he simultaneously posted the Italian version of his article on his own website, rossoporpora.org, where he summed up and specifically quoted forthright comments made by high-ranking clergymen from the Roman Curia who also openly revealed to him the atmosphere within the Vatican. They spoke with the explicit request that they should remain anonymous.
Rusconi starts his article with the stunning quote from one of his sources: “Francis has remained with his heart and mind the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. That would also be fine, if he were not, for two years now, the Bishop of Rome and therewith Pope of the Universal Church.”
As Rusconi says, many Curial members are still indignant about Pope Francis' last Christmas address in 2014 to the Roman Curia:
The large stomach of the Vatican still has not yet digested the last address of Pope Francis to the Curia on December 22 of last year. […] The address still burns under the skin of many Curials. 'If someone would have had the courage to get off his chair and to leave the Sala Clementina while the Pope was presenting his list [of reproaches and accusations], then, I think, all – or nearly all – would have left: right-wing or left-wing, young or old,' comments which came from my first interlocutor with the bitterness of a man who feels wounded. And he earnestly requested once more: 'That my name will not be made public! Can I rely on that?'
Rusconi describes the atmosphere within the Curia, as follows: “The Curia finds itself in an uncomfortable, even insecure situation.” He describes the intensification of conflicts in Rome:
Today, with the distance of two years, some of those wearers of the purple color who were then joining in jubilation might regret to have given their own vote to the then-76-year-old Archbishop. A struggle for Rome has started, and it is not at all clear who stands where – also because Francis himself speaks in a contradictory way. But there is already taking place a wrestling [a grappling]. And from October 4 on when between 200 and 300 bishops will meet in Rome for the [2015] Synod in order to speak about family questions, it could come to even harder fights.
Pope Francis' expression of “Who am I to judge?” also finds much criticism:
With this renunciation to judge, this 'sentence which has been abused by many media, Pope Francis did damage to the Church,' stressed another interlocutor from the Vatican with whom I met for lunch in Trastevere. 'He has, without intending it, favored the advance of the homosexual lobby which he claims to fight.'
Concerning the question of the family, many members of the Curia do not understand Pope Francis' intentions. As one source says to Rusconi: “One simply does not understand what Pope Francis' aims are. After a very firm principled declaration, he follows up with words and gestures that cause insecurity and confusion among orthodox Catholics.” In the eyes of this man, Pope Francis is tempted “to want to win the hearts of those who are, according to the current teaching, living in an irregular situation [i.e., remarried couples].”
Rusconi discusses some of those Cardinals who push for a liberalizing agenda with respect to the Church's moral teaching, namely, Reinhard Cardinal Marx and Walter Cardinal Kasper, both of whom are now meeting with resistance and adverse criticism. For example, he says about Cardinal Marx himself:
The President of the German Bishops' Conference [Cardinal Marx] does not have an easy status and standing in Rome these days, since he has claimed for the German Church the right to go its own pastoral ways with respect to the problem of the remarried divorcees, and independently of any majority of the Synod. 'We are not a subsidiary of Rome,' Marx has declared. The Swiss Curial Cardinal, Kurt Koch, promptly felt reminded of the 'German Christians' who bowed down to the Nazis during the Third Reich. In the same way, the German Curial Cardinal, Paul Josef Cordes, also disapproved of the ideas of Marx. He declared in the newspaper Die Tagespost: 'As a social ethicist, Cardinal Marx might have some knowledge about the [commercial-financial] dependencies of subsidiaries toward their mother company. But, in the context of the Church, such comments should rather be left to the village pub.'
One of Rusconi's interlocutors criticizes Pope Francis for trying to fight material poverty while omitting to speak about the danger of spiritual poverty, and even the loss of Faith. He says:
But the Church is universal, and the greatest poverty is the spiritual poverty, as one sees it especially in the Occident, where the number of Catholics is continually dwindling. Unfortunately, the Pope has very little interest in Europe.
The same source, as presented by Rusconi, comments on the Synod of the Family:
I think, he [Pope Francis] wants to lead the forthcoming Synod on the Family in October onto a certain path so that the Synod Fathers feel urged to choose [putatively] merciful solutions – which would be, in my eyes, not be a true mercy – especially with regard to the question whether remarried people shall be admitted to Holy Communion.
The journalist Rusconi concludes his very important synopsis of some of the internal criticisms from within the Curia with these words: “The dispute in the fall, however, could turn out just the same: sour and sharp.”
Not a pretty picture; and not an edifying example or ethos, is it?
It’s not celibacy — it’s homosexuality that is the problem.
Respectfully, that wholly misses the point, which is why the RCC clergy is so thoroughly infested with homosexuals. You're making the same argument the gay movement makes about AIDS - it's not homosexual conduct, it's the HIV virus. But just like your argument, it begs the question of why people engaged in homosexual acts were getting infected by the virus at such an alarming rate.
Here, very clearly the RCC clergy is throughly ridden by homosexuals. The question is "why are gays so attracted to the RCC priesthood, such that they are so vastly overrepresented among the clergy?"
I answered the question above, but I kindly ask that you think about that question and I further kindly ask you to post here precisely why you believe the RCC has a homosexual problem among its clergy. Why? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, the priestly celibacy rule contributes in some way to the problem?
The question is not whether the RCC officially condones homosexual acts or any other sexual acts outside marriage. It doesn’t. But again, that’s not the question. The question is why the RCC is being destroyed by clerical sexual misconduct, most homosexual misconduct? Please, annalex, address this question directly: “Does the RCC rule mandating priestly celibacy contribute in any way to the very disproportionate number (compared to the population at large) of homosexual priests who are doing most of the misconduct?
You're not understanding the concept of "regulatory capture." The RCC's regulators - the ones who should be insisting on godly conduct among priests - are themselves thoroughly infiltrated and subverted by the lavender mafia. In fact, they really are the leaders of the lavender mafia in the RCC.
Good heavens, do you suppose Cardinal Bernadine of Chicago or Bishop Weakland of Milwaukee would ever actually enforce celibacy among the priests subordinated to them? Quite obviously, the answer is no.
This is why it breaks my heart to hear Salvation pin all hope on a new reform movement to weed out gays at the seminary level. Sorry, but that obviously is mere window dressing. The lavender mafia - which reaches into the heart of the Vatican and all the way down to the parish level - will simply subvert the effort, and indeed ultimately turn it to their collective benefit, ensuring that even more homosexual men are ordained.
It's like the way the Goldman Sachs et al have captured the federal financial regulators. In 2008 Hank Paulsen - an inner sanctum member of the banker clique if there ever was one - wasn't about to do what he should have done as an independent regulator and let Goldman Sachs et al take their lumps.
Truly, just like the case of Hank Paulsen regulating the financial sector, with the RCC we have a "fox guarding the henhouse" situation.
I agree that we must "insist" on sexual morality, especially among the clergy, but we have to be realistic about what needs to be done to accomplish that. Quite obviously, we must remove all homosexuals from the clergy and prevent all future ordinations of homosexuals. Realistically, how do we get there from here?
I described above what Stalin did to utterly change the CPSU - the diabolical geniuses who make the Russian Revolution - into a body that would carry out his orders. In short, he had to utterly replace the Party bureaucracy with an entire generational cohort new members. Stalin's tactics must not be ours, but the strategy must be the same.
THE CADRES DETERMINE EVERYTHING.
We must flood the ranks of the clergy with married men of good character. We can do this by ordaining thousands and thousands of married deacons and setting them loose. They will, unavoidably, run up against the lavender power structure in the RCC. These are the men who can cleanse the ranks of this filth. The RCC hierarchy as it is now constituted is simply incapable of anything approaching the sort of revolution in RCC personnel policy that is required.
He’ll do just fine...watch and see.(and pray for him!!!!)
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I agree with this 100%.
He is using a straw man argument to appeal to the world.
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Wow! Either the Pope told you this directly or you claim to have the power to know his motivation.
How is it more backward than our own country at the present time? Have you ever been there?
Amen! ;-)
Nothing will work until the RCC scraps once and for all the celibacy rule for priests.
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LOL! That claim is as old as the Church, but it is not true.
From what I can see the clergy is increasingly lavender.
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Do you need new glasses? I have seen and worked with a lot of new seminarians and the majority are on-fire followers of Christ who are willing to sacrifice for Him.
Your experience is quite different from mine. As far as I can see they’re almost all queer.
While there certainly is a problem with homosexual behavior in the RCC clergy, I don't think that it is, at all, out of proportion to either clergy of other faiths nor men in general.Celibacy applies to all sexual activity, not just heterosexual copulation.
“Maybe the next one will be better.”
Oremus...
or I can just spot the obvious.
...or I can just spot the obvious.
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SURE you can .../sarc
Perhaps you have tunnel vision....or worse.
You’ve made some excellent points. I’ll mangle this reference, but if I recall it correctly, we are “of” this world but are not to be “in” it. The problems the RCC faces today are, unfortunately, largely due to its failure to attack secular humanism at its root.
What you’ve run into here is something I’ve only recently begun to understand and that is Nihilism. There are so many anymore that believe in nothing and are offended that some believe in something, particularly in something beyond purely human experience and understanding. Not only do they believe in nothing, they are intent on insuring that any professions of belief are doggedly attacked and they are intent on insuring that just like them, no one believes in anything whatsoever.
Fight on, but the “resistance” is becoming ever more intense and radicalized.
You are on to something, and I think you are quite correct.
Nihilism is it’s own religion.
Your scripture reference is exactly to the point. However, it reads... that while we are to be “in” the world, we are not to be “of” the world.
The reason I believe that particular scripture is so important today is that it is a helpful and fine measure of things, by which the people of God are able to discern who is guarding and defending the Truth as revealed by God, from those who would take the 30 pieces of silver to betray the Truth and the revelation of God handed down to his Church. “By their fruits we shall know them.” (And by our fruits, we are also known, of course.)
The Church “can not serve two masters” is also another important scripture measure. Today, all standards are being tested and certainly the Church is included, by the fallen standards of the world.
We shall soon see how the shepherds of the Church will stand or fall. That Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice” is quite comforting to His little flock.
May God kindly bless you and yours. Rita
The Church exited for 20 centuries with celibate men of good character; there is no shortage of them now.
The idea to diffuse the unique aspect of the Western Church by removing the celibacy requirement is in itself no better than the diabolical attacks from the left. They, too, see humanity as centered around the question of finding sexual release and consequently it is the celibate men of the Church that they correctly perceive as enemy.
Again, you misstate the problem. The issue is not celibacy per se, which indeed was no doubt a good thing at one time. The issue is rather that the celibacy rule in the conditions of modern society with its limitless options for healthy, intelligent and ambitious young men, has become the reason for the homosexual problem in the clergy.
Imagine that you're the head of HR for a large corporation. If you had a rule that led directly to the recruitment of large numbers of undesirables whose presence alienated the corporation from its core customer base and thereby constituted a vital threat to the very survival of the company, you would certainly change the rule.
That's precisely the situation with the RCC now. They have a major, major HR problem, which is that in modern society the celibacy rule lends itself to the recruitment into the ranks of the clergy very disproportionate numbers of homosexuals. To make matters even worse, the problem has gone on for so long that the ranks of RCC management have been thoroughly infiltrated and subverted by homosexuals who understand that the celibacy rule is the key driver of their position and their power. As a result, the very people who the RCC would look to for effective leadership in addressing their HR problem are deeply invested in ensuring that the problem is never effectively addressed.
Your "it worked for 20 centuries" argument sounds ver much like "famous last words." Absolute monarchy worked for just the longest time, too, but the times changed and those institutions, like, say, the French monarchy, who were too brittle to recognize the social tidal shift wound up getting swept away.
So, too, the pollyanas in the RCC refuse to see that the celibacy rule has long since become an lethal liability for the RCC. It just cost them Holy Ireland. It probably already has cost them Poland, Austria, and Croatia. Latin America is pulling away. And still so many remain in complete flight from reality as to the nature and severity of the RCC's personnel crisis.
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