DE HOC MUNDO
The “Secularization” of Authority
as a Premise for Religious Freedom and Ecumenical Dialogue
Theorized by Vatican II
Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo.
Jn 18:36
I. Introduction
The
wound inflicted by the Second Vatican Council on the ecclesial body and —
consequently — on the entire social body is anything but healed after sixty
years, and indeed continues to become gangrenous with very serious damage
before the eyes of all. The enthusiastic and self-congratulatory tones with which
the Bergoglian Sanhedrin praises the Council cannot cancel the ruin it has
brought to the Church and to souls.
In my previous essay on the self-referentiality of the “conciliar church” (here), I highlighted some crucial aspects of this identity crisis, to which an element that I consider fundamental in understanding the subversive nature of the Council has recently been added. I am referring to the letter that Benedict XVI sent to the Rector of the Franciscan University of Steubenville (here) on October 7. I have wanted to address this theme in greater depth: examining Ratzinger’s thesis is indispensable in order to identify the ideological premises and the methods of practical fulfillment of the revolution inaugurated by Vatican II on the doctrinal, moral, liturgical, and disciplinary fronts within the Catholic Church.
II. The Permanent Revolution
I have used the expression
“revolution inaugurated by Vatican II” because it now seems clear to me that
the intolerable excesses that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has indulged in for almost
ten years are simply the coherent application in the ecclesial sphere of the
principle of permanent revolution theorized in the social sphere by
Marx, Engels, and Trotsky. The idea of “permanent revolution” arises from the
observation of the ideologues of Bolshevism that the proletariat was not so
enthusiastic about communist methods and that, if they wanted to spread class
struggle throughout the world, it was necessary to force it by means of
authority and make it irreversible: because only in the Revolution does the χάος [chaos] occur that drives the subversive action against the social
order.
A similar way of proceeding
has been adopted by the Bergoglian church: since the conciliar revolution has
not been welcomed with enthusiasm by the “Catholic proletariat,” the Central
Committee of Santa Marta resorts to what Lenin called the “transcription of the
revolution,” extending the mentality of Vatican II also into those doctrinal
areas which initially none of its proponents would have dared to touch.
This is why the Synod on Synodality is necessary, that is, the establishment of a sort of “permanent Council,” or rather a “permanent aggiornamento” (here) which makes itself the promoter of supposed instances of the base — the ecclesial version of the proletariat — such as the female diaconate and the “radical inclusion” of couples who are divorced and remarried, cohabiting couples, polygamists, and homosexual couples with adopted children who adhere to the LGBTQ movement (here). It will be noted that these requests, which are all completely inadmissible from a doctrinal and moral point of view that is faithful to the Magisterium, do not constitute a faithful and spontaneous picture of what the Clergy and faithful are demanding from the Supreme Authority of the Church, but rather the fraudulent fiction of Bergoglian propaganda, along the lines of the manipulations that have already been experienced earlier at the Synod on the Family that gave birth to the heretical monstrum called Amoris Lætitia.
And also in this case, reality
is distorted by the revolution in order to adapt it by force to its own
dystopian thought, with the presumptuous idea of having a solution that is
better than that which the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of the Church or the will
of its Founder intended to arrange. We are dealing with mass manipulation
applied in the ecclesial field, using the techniques of the worst totalitarian
regimes that today are adopted both by the globalist elite with the pandemic
farce and the ecological transition, and also by the Bergoglian sect that is an
ally and supporter of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Agenda 2030.
III. The Ratzingerian Synthesis of the People of God and the Mystical Body
Benedict XVI’s letter of October 7, 2022, lays out what he had already stated in his speech to the German Parliament on September 22, 2011 (here). His first formulation of his criticism of medieval Augustinianism,[1] however, occurred in his dissertation People and House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church, presented in Paris long ago, on the occasion of the 1954 Augustinian Congress (here).
Recalling an idea developed by
the Harnack school, Ratzinger states:
“The two Civitates did not mean any corporate bodies, but rather the representation of the two basic forces of belief and unbelief in history. […] The Civitas Dei is not simply identical with the institution of the Church. In this respect, the medieval Augustine was indeed a fatal error, which today, fortunately, has been finally overcome.”
The theme addressed by the
dissertation and briefly touched on by the letter is the ecclesiological
doctrine of the Mystical Body, which, according to the author, ended with Pius
XII’s Encyclical Mystici Corporis. In the last years of the 1950s, as
Pius XII was ill, there was a resurgence of the rerum novarum cupiditas[2] of the progressive
theologians, for whom the supernatural dimension of the Church was too
spiritual and therefore had to be replaced with the more seductive Augustinian
phrase of “people of God,” easily interpretable both in an ecumenical key for
its inclusion of the Jewish people of the Old Law and also in a democratic key
for possible sociological and political developments. Obviously, this
ideological definition reveals its modernist background perfectly coherent with
the thought of Harnack and his pupil.
It will not escape notice that
this theme of the 25-year-old Ratzinger would also be addressed by the Council,
and therefore there is no surprise in the pride with which the Pope Emeritus
refers precisely to the themes that were decisive in his theological formation
and in his ecclesiastical career and which are now put into practice by his
Successor.
The philosophical approach of
Joseph Ratzinger is essentially Hegelian, and therefore it is imbued with
“absolute idealism,”[3] following the scheme of
“thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” In this case, between the Catholic thesis of
the Mystical Body and the progressivist antithesis of the people of God,
Vatican II and the post-council supposedly ended by accepting the exact synthesis that he had theorized in his 1954 dissertation: “the Church is the people of
God existing as body of Christ,” in which Christ gives himself to the
believer as Body and transforms him into his own Body.
A bold thesis, on closer
inspection, that risks confusing the substantial difference between the Body of
Christ truly present in His entirety in the Eucharistic Species and the Body of
Christ realized mystically by the union of the living members of the
Church with her divine Head. This confusion would have then permitted not a few
progressive or completely heretical theologians to wink at Protestants thanks
to the imprecise formulation of “Body of Christ.” It would equally have given
Francis the opportunity to appropriate the daring pauperistic-eucharistic
metaphors of Raniero Cantalamessa, who defines the poor as
the “true Body of Christ,” whose “real presence” is supposedly realized among
those who by welcoming them welcome Him.
IV. Civitas Dei and civitas diaboli
The problem that arises is
complex and developed: it consists of two aspects, one ad intra,
relative to what the “conciliar church” is and wants to be; the other ad
extra, relative to its role in the world and relations with other
religions. The ad intra aspect touches the nature of the institution,
seeking to deconstruct it in a democratic and synodal key under the false
pretext of a rediscovered “wider spiritual dimension” to the detriment of
dogma; the ad extra aspect implies an “ecumenical” approach to the
world, dialogue with sects and false religions, and the renunciation of the
evangelization of peoples, replacing it with an ecological and philanthropic
message that has neither dogmas nor morality.
The error of the “medieval
Augustine,” according to the Emeritus, supposedly consisted in having wanted to
identify the Civitas Dei with the visible Church, while it is evident
that that is valid as a model for the Christianitas: that is, the
transnational society in which the laws and regulations achieve the Psalmist’s
hopes: Beatus populus, cuius Dominus Deus eius — “Blessed are the people
whose God is the Lord” (Ps 143:15).
Doctrine teaches us that precisely because of her earthly dimension, the
Church Militant is at the same time holy like the heavenly Jerusalem and sinful
in her members, infallible in her Magisterium and fallible in her Ministers.
Nor is it true that Saint Augustine or his medieval commentators pointed to the
State as the civitas diaboli; on the contrary, they recognized its
providential role in the economy of salvation and the need for civil authority
to conform not only to the Natural Law but also to the Catholic Magisterium.
If there is a civitas diaboli recognizable by its ontological evil,
it must be identified in the New World Order and in all those equally
transnational organizations that work for the establishment of the globalist
synarchy. The Bergoglian sect is no exception, which not by chance is an ally
and supporter of these subversive criminals.
V. The Ratzingerian Critique of Medieval Augustinianism
Another very serious
theological error that adulterates the true nature of the Church lies in the
essentially secularist foundations of conciliar ecclesiology, which seeks to
adapt the objective reality to its own ideological scheme that is in continual
mutation.
I use the term “secularist” [“laicista”]
because it seems clear to me that this vision is totally devoid of a supernatural
gaze: that all-encompassing gaze that knows how to see earthly realities sub
specie æternitatis [from the perspective of eternity] not for mere
intellectual speculation but because it is animated by the theological Virtues.
In the nonsense of these intellectuals there emerges a disconsolate lack of
passion, of guts, of blood: it is all theoretical, all established in order to
aseptically frustrate the Redemption and cancel the ordo christianus [Christian order], appropriating the Orwellian methods of cancel culture.
This error, insinuated in the
texts of Vatican II and in particular in Dignitatis Humanæ concerning
religious freedom and in Nostra Aetate concerning the relation of the
Church with non-Christian religions and Judaism, places the “conciliar church”
in deliberate discontinuity with the Catholic Church, “for the first time,”
according to the words of Benedict XVI. He states:
“It addressed the freedom to choose and to practice religion, as well as the freedom to change it, as fundamental rights of the liberty of man. Precisely by virtue of its most profound reasons, such a conception could not be extraneous to the Christian faith, which had entered the world with the claim that the State could not decide on the truth and could not demand any type of worship. The Christian faith claimed freedom for religious conviction and for its practice in worship, without thereby violating the right of the State in its own order: Christians prayed for the emperor but did not worship him. From this point of view, it can be said that Christianity, with its birth, brought the world the principle of freedom of religion.”[4]
The misunderstanding is based
on the double meaning that is attributed to the term “freedom of religion.” In
the Catholic sense it indicates the freedom of the baptized person to publicly
profess the True Faith without obstacles on the part of the State. In the
modernist sense it refers to the abstract liberty of anyone with a belief to
have the same right and the same liberty recognized on the part of the State.
Another misunderstanding
arises when the State that recognizes particular rights and privileges for the
Church is considered indifferently in comparison with the State that professes
a false religion or declares itself “secular” and forbids the profession of the
True Religion or equates it with any other cult. The Church has always sought,
over the centuries, to prudently reconcile her rights with the diverse
situations of the Nations in which Catholicism was not tolerated or was
persecuted: provoking anti-Catholic rulers to persecute their Catholic subjects
would be a reckless or imprudent act. Nevertheless, the fact that the Church
can ask for tolerance for herself and for her faithful in situations of
numerical minority does not imply that equal rights apply to other situations
in which the Church sees her institutional role recognized by a State that
officially professes to be Catholic.
And yet, in the name of the
“freedom of religion” theorized by Vatican II, it was the Hierarchy itself that
asked Nations like Spain or Italy to renounce recognizing it as the State
Religion, modifying the Concordats and abrogating the privileges that centuries
of Catholicism had legally recognized. From this point of view, it is therefore
improper to affirm that “Christianity, with its birth, brought to the world the
principle of freedom of religion,” indeed, because of its diversity it had face
the persecution and martyrdom of its own faithful. The first Christians did not
ask to have the Most Holy Trinity admitted to the Pantheon, but rather to be
left free to practice their own monotheism that so amazed the Romans. And they
claimed this “freedom of religion” for themselves, certainly not for the
pagans, whom vice versa they sought (successfully) to convert to the True
Faith.
It seems that it is being
forgotten that the Church is the holder of rights that derive directly from God,
and that it is up to the State to recognize them and protect them, not merely
as a quantitative matter, but because the Catholic Religion is objectively true
and socially indispensable to the pursuit of the common good. In this regard,
it is worth quoting Leo XIII:
“If there is a remedy for the evils of the world, this can happen in no other way than a return to Christian life and customs. This is a solemn principle, that in order to reform a society in decadence, it is necessary to bring it back to the principles that have given it being, the perfection of every society is placed in the effort to reach its purpose: in such a way that the generating principle of the motions and social actions may be the same that generated the association. Therefore, to deviate from the primitive purpose is corruption; returning to it is salvation.”[5]
The fact that the State may
deny the recognition of these rights is accidental, and the Church can also
decide not to impose herself; but it is not up to her to claim rights for those
who spread error, with the sole purpose of ingratiating herself with them or
giving proof of an ecumenical zeal that is totally extraneous to her mission.
VI. The Falsification of Reality to Make a False Idea Seem True
On closer inspection, traditional thought is much more attentive to the
role of persons who hold institutional positions —
Popes, Kings, prelates and rulers, faithful and subjects — than to the abstract
concept of the institution: because the Lord died to save our souls, not legal
entities; and because the Church has the task of converting all peoples,
including the rulers of nations, in such a way that even the role they play may
be enlivened by grace and may contribute to the greater good of the people they
govern.
This mythical “medieval Augustine” did not commit any error: neither in
pointing out the supernatural paradigm to which the earthly Authorities — both
spiritual and temporal — must conform, nor in theorizing the subordination of
civil power to religious power, with both together subject to the power of God.
The fatal error was committed rather on the strongly ideologized front of
ecclesiastical neo-modernism and political progressivism, whose followers seek,
without any foundation, to attribute to political Augustinianism a
doctrinal formulation that according to them does not correspond to the message
of the first centuries. Saint
Augustine never claimed that the authority of the State is in some way detached
from true Religion. Instead, the Bishop of Hippo declares:
“We say that [Christian emperors] are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honors, and the obsequiousness of those who salute them with an excessive humility, but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love, and honor God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have rivals; if they are slow to punish and ready to pardon; if they apply punishment only as necessary to govern and defend the state and not to gratify their own enmity; if they grant pardon, not that the violation of the law may go unpunished but with the hope that the transgressor may amend his ways; if they compensate the severe decisions that they are often constrained to make with the mildness of compassion and with munificence; if their luxury is as much restrained as it might have been uncontrolled; if they prefer to govern depraved passions rather than many nations, and if they conduct themselves this way not out of longing for a futile glory but for love of eternal felicity; if they do not neglect to offer to the true God the sacrifice of humility, clemency, and prayer for their own sins. We say that Christian emperors endowed with such qualities are happy in the present age through hope, and in the age that follows they will be happy in the enjoyment of the reality itself, when the object of our waiting will have come true.”[6]
In fact, it is not possible
that a society composed of individual persons who each have the moral duty to
recognize Divine Revelation and obey the Commandments of God and the authority
of the Church may evade the same duty. Just as it is not true that the presence
of other religions, numerically relevant regardless of the aberrations of
doctrine that they teach, can legitimize an attitude of resigned acknowledgment
of the marginalization of the One True Religion, above all when this loss of
consent and of support from the State and society is mainly due to the
abdication of the Catholic Hierarchy on the basis of conciliar deviations.
VII. The Sacrality of Authority against Totalitarian Drifts
The formulation of Saint
Augustine — which is not exhausted in the De Civitate Dei but finds
ample orthodox clarification in the entire corpus of his writings —
should be read in coherence with Sacred Scripture and the Catholic Magisterium,
which moreover are heirs of the vicarious vision of civil authority that
belonged to the people of Israel itself, whose Kings were representatives of
the authority of God, as also were the Christian monarchs, beginning with
Byzantium.
The sacrality of civil
authority, inherited from Greco-Roman civilization, was so deeply rooted in the
Christian world that it even assumed ceremonial connotations proper to Holy
Orders: we may think of the anointing of the monarch with Chrism, or the
liturgical vestments of the Eastern Emperor and the Czars of Russia, the
coronation ritual of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and the prelate-like
ceremonies of the Doge of Venice. But also in the Comuni of Italy,
apparently presented as more “secular” with respect to the Monarchies, the
concept of the well-ordered res publica was developed in the Middle Ages
in coherence with the Faith and exemplified by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the
frescoes of the Allegory of Good Government in the Palazzo Publico of
Siena.
Artificially separating the
harmony and hierarchical complementarity between spiritual authority and
temporal authority was an unfortunate operation that created the premise,
whenever it was realized, for either tyranny or anarchy. The reason is all too
obvious: Christ is King of both the Church and of Nations, because all
authority comes from God (Rom 13:1). Denying that rulers have the duty to
submit to the Lordship of Christ is a very serious error, because without the
moral Law the State can impose its own will, regardless of the will of God, and
therefore subverting the divine κόσμος [order] of the Civitas Dei in
order to replace it with arbitrary free will and the infernal χάος [chaos] of
the civitas diaboli.
And here we understand how both the
one and the other civitas constitute a model to strive for and not an
actuated reality, without either abstruse “spiritualizations” or coarse “realisms.”
We also understand how behind these merely intellectual speculations lies the
idealist approach of a Hegelian matrix, which arises from the desire to create
a fictitious reality to be opposed to the reality willed by God, indeed to
impose a Promethean alternative to the Passion of the Savior, which scandalizes
precisely because of the redeeming Cross and the fact that, in the economy of
Redemption, the Cross is a royal throne: regnavit a ligno Deus [God has
reigned from the tree]. To believe that the world is able to not be Christian
and can do without God by surviving on its own is a hellish and blasphemous
chimera.
VIII. The Secularization of Ecclesiastical Authority
On the other hand, those who
wanted to give a theological patina to the secular nature of the State — as a
necessary consequence of the “freedom of religion” that was theorized for
individuals — necessarily had to deny the doctrinal premises of Scripture, the
Fathers, and the Magisterium, appealing to an alleged corruption of the true
Christian message in the work of the medieval thinkers. As can be seen,
doctrinal deviation is always based on lies, historical falsification, and the
ignorance of the interlocutors on whom they want to impose their errors.
The consequences are
devastating and visible for all to see: if a societas perfecta [perfect
society] is not required to recognize the Lord as its Sovereign, this must
necessarily also apply to the earthly Church, whose Hierarchy can therefore
decide to exercise its authority simply for the purpose of maintaining power and
not within the well-defined boundaries established by Her divine Founder. It is
no coincidence that the post-conciliar period did everything to cancel the
doctrine of the Kingship of Christ, tampering with the liturgical texts of the
Feast instituted by Pius XI in 1925 with the Encyclical Quas Primas.
Ratzinger speaks of “my
ecclesiology,” affirming that the Church can neither call herself Civitas
Dei nor can she presume to consider still current the doctrine that Pius
XII defined in his 1943 Encyclical Mystici Corporis. The Emeritus
writes: “But the complete spiritualization of the concept of the Church, for
its part, misses the realism of faith and its institutions in the world. Thus,
in Vatican II the question of the Church in the world finally became the real
central problem.” So central as to modify Catholic doctrine in order to appear à
la page, dialoguing, inclusive, philanthropic. But it was precisely the
loss of its role as Domina gentium [Lady, or mistress, of the gentiles] which
led the “conciliar church” to a renounced, marginal position of social
irrelevance: it is the pretium sanguinis [price of blood] with which it
stained itself, betraying the mandate of Christ and allowing itself to be polluted
by the ideas of the world. And if the Church up until Pius XII had the Civitas
Dei as a model and considered herself the Mystical Body of Christ, despite
the weakness of her members, it appears that in recent decades the model which
has inspired the proponents of Vatican II is rather that of the civitas
diaboli, judging by the support that the Holy See offers to globalist
ideology, to the neo-Malthusian delusions of the “green economy,” to
transhumanism, and to the entire gender and LGBTQ repertoire.
30 October 2022
Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Regis
[1] The term medieval
Augustinianism means the development of Augustinian thought, in particular
relative to the political and social implications of the doctrine about the Civitas
Dei and the civitas diaboli, which according to the innovators
distorted the original thought of Saint Augustine, exasperating for example the
theocratic vision of power, both civil as well as ecclesiastical. It goes
without saying that this criticism is specious and is based on real historical
falsifications: the idea that all power originated from God was already very
clear to the Bishop of Hippo and its explanation in medieval political
Augustinianism is perfectly coherent with Tradition.
[2] Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, 48 Rerum novarum cupiditas Catilinæ
animum incendebat. Catiline burned with desire for a revolution [literally: with the desire for novelty].
[3] Hegelian
idealism marks the abandonment of Aristotelian logic (also called the logic
of non-contradiction), in favor of a new so-called substantial logic.
Being is no longer statically opposed to non-being, but is made to coincide
with the latter by passing into becoming. Hegelian idealism, which resolves all
the contradictions of reality in absolute Reason, will have an immanentistic
outcome, recognizing in itself, and no longer in a transcendent principle, the goal
and ultimate aim of Philosophy.
[4] Joseph Ratzinger, Opera omnia, volume VII/1, Gli insegnamenti
del Concilio Vaticano II, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2016, Prefazione (Castel
Gandolfo, 2 Agosto 2012).
[5] Encyclical
Letter Rerum Novarum, 27 (15 May 1891).
[6] De Civitate Dei, V, 24.
The post Abp. Viganò Critiques Benedict XVI’s Theology, Decries “Permanent Revolution” of Vatican II appeared first on Catholic Family News.