The German prelate bluntly answers this question: “In your opinion, what is the reason for this attempt to reform the Church that wants to change everything: morals, principles, teaching, and tradition?”:
“Many well-paid civil servants in the corporate ‘German Church’ – Germany’s largest employer – suffer from the fact that Church teaching on marriage and the 6th and 9th commandments of the Decalogue contradict the prevailing opinions of society, due to the sexual revolution of 1968.”
“They do not support the contradiction of their personal behavior with the will of God, nor the mocking comments of their contemporaries on the ‘Catholic world of faith and morals which remained in the Middle Ages.’ That is why they want to present themselves as modern, and follow the vanguard of science, psychology, and sociology. They want to be there, and not be perceived as outsiders, as the ‘sordid son of the nation,’ as the Bishop of Aachen lamented.”
Reading this distressing picture of the German episcopate, one inevitably thinks of these words that Blaise Pascal put into the mouths of certain Jesuits: “Men have arrived at such a pitch of corruption today, that, unable to make them come to us, we must go to them, otherwise they would cast us off altogether; and what is worse, they would become perfect reprobates.”
“It is to retain such characters as these that our casuists have taken under consideration the vices to which people of various conditions are most addicted, with the view of laying down maxims which, while they cannot be said to violate the truth, are so gentle that he must be a very impracticable subject indeed who is not pleased with them. The grand project of our Society, for the good of religion, is never to repulse any one, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to despair.” [VI Provincial]
When asked about the risk of a German schism, Cardinal Müller answers with painful irony: “In their blind arrogance, they [the German bishops] do not think of division, but of taking charge of the universal Church. Germany is too small for them to exercise their ideology of domination.”
“They claim a leading role in the universal Church. It is really about making the whole world happy with their wisdom and freeing backward and uneducated Catholics, and their bishops in other countries, including the pope, from the burden of divine revelation and commandments.”
“Their goal is the transformation of the Church of the Triune God into a worldly service organization (NGO). Then we would finally have arrived at the ‘religion of universal brotherhood,’ that is, a religion without the God of revelation through Christ, without the Truth that goes beyond finite reason, without dogmas and sacraments as the necessary means of grace for salvation.”
In the same interview on InfoVaticana, the German prelate was asked the question that is on everyone’s lips: “Why, in the Church, are they speaking more and more of subjects such as ecology, the planet, or other such subjects, and less of Jesus Christ and His teachings?”
The answer is straightforward: “In a world where the meaning and purpose of human beings are materially limited to temporary and transitory contents (such as the acquisition of power, prestige, money, luxury, pleasant feelings), it is easier to become interesting by being an agent of this New World Order program without God (according to the capitalist or communist readings).”
“But, ‘for what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?’ (Mk 8:36) If we want to be disciples of Jesus, we must also obey his word: ‘But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ (Lk 12:31). There is no strict opposition between eternal/spiritual goods and the temporal/perishable necessities of life.”
“But we ask first of God our Father that His kingdom come and that His holy will be done in heaven as it is on earth. And we also ask for our daily bread, the forgiveness of our sins as we forgive those who offend us, and to be delivered from all the evils derived from our sinful separation from God, which is the origin and goal of every human being.”
A “Missionary” Church as Opposed to a “Constantinian” Church
In Correspondance Européenne on September 10, 2022, the academic Roberto de Mattei recalled the historical cause of this dramatic situation, which is far from being the fruit of spontaneous generation: “In a famous conference held on May 13, 1961, in the UNESCO building in Paris, one of the fathers of the New Theology, the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, presented the advent of secularization as the end of the ‘Constantinian era.’”
“Fr. Chenu proposed a new ‘missionary Church,’ in which the mission must be understood as ‘an operation by which the Church comes out of herself – from ‘Christianity’ – to address the unbeliever, to meet ‘those who are far away’… [already the peripheries, dear to Francis. Ed.], in the awareness that this is its constitutive essence.”
“Here is the end of the Constantinian era!” [A Council for Our Time]. The Church no longer had to pose the problem of Christianizing the world, but of accepting it as it was, by placing itself within it.”
“For the Dominican theologian, it is in the relationship that he establishes with a changed world that the Christian of the ‘Constantinian spirit’ is distinguished from the Christian of the ‘evangelical type’: the first criticizes modernity, the second seeks dialogue with it, ‘through fidelity… to a mystery of the incarnation that he applies to the humanity of the 20th century.’”
“Fr. Chenu affirmed the need to eliminate the Constantinian spirit by destroying the three pillars on which it was founded: Roman law, to which we owe the legal cage that imprisons the Church; the Greco-Roman logos, which is the cause of its dogmatic rigidity; and Latin, the universal liturgical language, which would prevent its creative development. What has happened during the past sixty years is the unfolding of this program.”
And the Italian historian shows, in a striking shortcut, the final stage of this “creative development” of the liturgy desired by Fr. Chenu: “No priest faithful to the ancient Roman rite could ever have celebrated a bare-chested Mass on an inflatable mattress, while this scandal was made possible by the new liturgy.”
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