The advances made by the Homosexual Collective during the three hundred forty days that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been posing as “Pope Francis” are truly astoundingly mind-boggling.
Gone are the days of official posturing by conciliar officials within the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River concerning various diocesan programs and “ministries” that curried favor with unrepentant practitioners of perversity. “Official” reprimands of such groups as “Dignity USA” and “New Ways Ministry” are things of the past. “Francis the Merciful” has tickled the itching ears of many pestilential vermin within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that the conciliar Vatican had “tolerated” on a de facto basis even while reproving on a de jure basis. Almost the entirety of the sodomite agenda has received de facto endorsement from Bergolio and his lieutenants, up to and including “Archbishop” Georg Ganswein, who is on day duty for Jorge and does night duty for the man who groomed him for his current position of influence, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.
Consider how Bergoglio indemnified a proven sodomite, “Monsignor” Battista Ricca, who remains his own hand-picked director of the Institute for Religious Works, the Vatican Bank, while he was flying back to Rome on Monday, July 29, 2013, after having presided over the travesty known as “World Youth Day” in Rio di Janeiro, Brazil:
Speaking of other problems within the administration of the Holy See, including rumours of a ‘gay lobby’ within the Vatican, Pope Francis said there are many saintly people working in the Curia but also those who are not so saintly and cause scandals which harm the Church. Quoting from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he said that people with homosexual tendencies must not be excluded but should be integrated into society. “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” he asked. (Francis the Revolutionary holds press conference on flight back from Brazil. See also Francis Says ¡Viva la Revolución!, part three.)
Those five little words, "Who am I to judge?", helped the Homosexual Collective within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism and in the world-at-large to advance their agenda of perversity in the name of "toleration" and "compassion" and "diversity" with more and more boldness.
The facts in Battista Ricca's case were entirely. Jorge, however, just merely shrugged his shoulders and said "Who am I to judge?", the slogan that warmed the hearts of practitioners of perversity worldwide, just two weeks after his spokesflack, "Father" Federico Lombardi, S.J., had called the accuations against Ricca to have been "not trustworthy," something that prompted Vaticanologist Sandro Magister to shoot back with a point-by-by-point refutation of Lombardi (see (On "Gay Lobby", Sandro Magister challenges the Vatican: "We have the evidence").
Remember also that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has protected and promoted and personally endorsed all manner of unapologetic homosexual activitists within the ranks of the structures of his false church, including going so far as to hold the hand of the hand of a homosexual activist named “Father” Luigi Ciotti as they walked up the steps of a Roman church on April 2, 2014:
(See the story at the Call Me Jorge website)
Jorge Mario Bergoglio also kissed the hand of a ninety-three year-old homosexual activist named Don Michele De Paolis when he met with him at the Casa Santa Marta on May 7, 2014 (See Jorge the Kissing Fool.)
Bergoglio has no problem with those who live in lives of unrepentant sins of perversion, and he has no problem with those who promote it, which is why he insisted that language "sensitive" to the needs of practicing sodomites be kept in the final report of last year's "extraordinary synod of bishops" after the passages had failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority approval from the "bishops" in attednance. Lorenzo Baldiserri (see Modernnists Say Nothing Original) has been kind enough to admit that this is the case, an admission that came shortly before Bergoglio met with a woman who had mutiliated herself in an attempt to become a "man" after she had written to him, a letter that prompted Jorge to offer to pay her travel expenses to the Casa Santa Marta along with her supposed "fiancee" (see Mutilating All Truth.)
It should not surprise us in the slighest that none that the nefarious promoter of the Homosexual Collective's agenda of evil that cries out to Heaven for vengeance, New Ways Ministry, is being welcomed at this time by conciliar officials within the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber Riber, starting with Ratzinger/Benedict's fair-haired man-servant, "Archbishop" Georg Ganswein:
ROME (RNS) On its 15 previous pilgrimages, the Catholic gay rights group New Ways Ministry drew maybe two-dozen people to visit holy sites in places like Assisi and Rome.
This year, the number of pilgrims unexpectedly doubled to 50.
Chalk it up to the so-called Francis Effect, where the pope’s open-arms acceptance is giving new hope to gay and lesbian Catholics who have felt alienated from their church for decades.
What’s been even more surprising is that both New Ways and a similar Catholic LGBT organization in Britain are finding support from the Catholic hierarchy in their efforts to meet the pontiff when they both visit the Vatican on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 18), the start of Lent, the period of penance and fasting preceding Easter.
For example, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, head of the papal household and the top aide to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, responded to New Ways’ request for a papal meet-and-greet by reserving tickets for the group at Francis’ weekly public audience in St. Peter’s Square. It’s not a private meeting — which is tough for anyone to get — but it’s not nothing.
The pope’s ambassador to Washington forwarded a similar request to Rome. Even San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone — point man for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage — had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.
Last December, Cordileone had a constructive meeting with Frank DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways, and Sister Jeannine Gramick, a co-founder of New Ways and a longtime advocate for LGBT inclusion in the church. But they were still surprised by the archbishop’s willingness to write a letter for them.
Moreover, British Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster sent a warm blessing to a group of LGBT Catholics from London who are joining up with New Ways in Rome. “Be assured of my prayers for each and every one of you,” Nichols wrote. “Have a wonderful pilgrimage. God bless you all.”
“I feel that the positive reaction that we have been getting from the hierarchy is due to the welcoming spirit of Pope Francis, who wants to welcome everyone,” said Gramick, speaking by phone from Assisi, the pilgrims’ last stop before heading to Rome.
“It’s very heartening to people who have felt alienated and rejected for so long, so we are feeling very hopeful.”
Gramick knows about rejection. In 1999, she was silenced by the Vatican for her “erroneous and dangerous” work with gay Catholics. She and the Catholic priest who co-founded New Ways Ministry in 1977 had “caused confusion among the Catholic people and have harmed the community of the church,” said the office headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would later be elected Benedict XVI.
The ministry’s work was called “doctrinally unacceptable.” A year later, Gramick was barred from even speaking of the 11-year probe of her work, an order she refused. As late as 2010, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops referred to New Ways as having “no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church.”
Now, the group is hoping the Vatican will include them among the list of official pilgrimage groups read aloud at the audience. They’d also love to get close enough to the pope to shake his hand and maybe pose for a picture as he passes through the crowds.
If those sound like small steps, LGBT Catholics say they would, in fact, represent a huge leap forward considering how they were treated under the papacies of Benedict and St. John Paul II.
Francis, on the other hand, has clearly shifted the tone of the conversation, even if substantial changes remain elusive.
The shift began with one of Francis’ signature lines, from an in-flight press conference a few months after his election in 2013, when he was asked about whether a gay man could be a priest. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis famously said.
He even used the English word “gay,” something no pope had ever done, as most bishops prefer the more clinical term “homosexual.”
A few months later, Francis personally responded to an appeal from a gay Catholic group in Florence, telling them he enjoyed and appreciated their letter and assuring them of his blessing.
Then last month, it emerged Francis met with a transgender person from Spain who had written to the pope — with assistance from his bishop — after feeling rejected by his parish because of his sex-change operation. It was a moving moment for Diego Neria Lejarraga, and many LGBT Catholics.
“This man loves the whole world,” he told CNN, referring to Francis. “I think there’s not — in his head, in his way of thinking, discrimination against anyone. I’m speaking about him, not the institution.”
Francis also encouraged discussions of the church’s outreach to gay and lesbian Catholics at last October’s summit of top cardinals and bishops on family life — discussions that produced some remarkable, even unprecedented, praise from church leaders to the faith and witness of LGBT Catholics.
At the same time, Francis has frequently reiterated the church’s teaching that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and he has ripped what he calls the “ideological colonization of the family” by the West, language that refers in part to efforts to promote gay marriage and other issues in developing countries. He has also blasted “gender theory,” which for many is a suspect buzzword of secular culture.
Still, the New Ways leaders and many gay Catholics see real reasons for hope, and not just for themselves.
Since the start of his papacy, Francis has sought to shift the hierarchy’s focus away from what he said is an “obsession” with sexual issues and toward a greater concern for the poor and all those rejected by the church and society, a social justice priority that many gay Catholics also share.
In addition, LGBT Catholics see the shift toward open discussion of a range of topics as good for the church, and themselves.
“While LGBT Catholics hope for changes, they are realistic enough to know that Francis may not make those changes,” said DeBernardo. “But he is doing things that will help their spiritual lives.”
DeBernardo said many gay Catholics are not looking for approval from the church as much an acknowledgment of their existence and a willingness to “treat them as human beings."
A photo-op or shout-out at Wednesday’s audience might be one such acknowledgement. “We take the long view,” Gramick said, “and every step is progress.” (Gay Catholics find a new tone under
Pope Francis
.)
The lavender chickens that have been nesting within the walls of the conciliar-occupied Vatican since the days of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI and have been hatching aplenty in conciliar occupied dioceses and parishes and universities and colleges and schools and religious communities throughout the world are now being given "free range" by Jorge Mario Bergoglio to represent old ways of sending souls to Hell for all eternity as somehow "new."
Here is yet another example, provided by "New Ways Ministry" itself in the latter part of 2013, of Bergoglio's "outreach" to those who have been enabled the caesars of Modernity and by many of the conciliar "bishops" prior to his "election" on March 13, 2013:
Pen and paper. Among the many revolutions made by Pope Bergoglio, in addition to phone calls home to ordinary people ... there is also the "post effect," the mountain of letters delivered every day at his residence in Santa Marta, and sent directly to him. ...
Some people think it may have been one of these "messages in a bottle" that inspired the breakthrough of Bergoglio about gays. A letter sent in June to the pope by various Italian gay Catholics ... where gays and lesbians asked Francis to be recognized as people and not as a "category" and called for openness and dialogue on the part of the Church, recalling that the closure "always feeds homophobia."
Further information comes from America magazine, which only weeks ago carried a groundbreaking interview with Francis where his remarks on homosexuality were positive and welcoming. That publication reports on the Italian group, Kairos of Florence:
"A leader of the impromptu committee said as gay Catholics they had in the past written to other members of the church leadership in Italy and had always before been rewarded with silence. …
The Kairos group said they also received a letter from the Vatican Secretariat of State, which informed them that Pope Francis "really enjoyed" their letter to him and the way it was written, calling it an act of "spontaneous confidence."
One Kairos leader said Pope Francis had also assured the group of his blessing, something they could not before have imagined happening. The members of Kairos have decided to keep the rest of the message of both letters private.
When New Ways Ministry led a pilgrimage to Italy in 2011, the Kairos group met with our American travelers to share stories and perspectives. Francis DeBernardo, our executive director, is contacting them currently to learn more about this papal letter.
While the contents of the pope's letter remain private, truly as if between a pastor and the people he serves, there are broader lessons for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and ally Catholic community in this experience.
First, the wisdom that relational encounters with people are the most effective form of advocacy is relevant even for the pope. If La Repubblica's conjecture is correct that the personal letter from Kairos of Florence led to Francis' "Who am I to judge?" and other comments that have greatly shifted the church's tone on LGBT issues, then everyone should be writing letters to Rome. New Ways Ministry wrote a letter to Francis, telling him about the goodness and holiness of Catholic LGBT people and pastoral outreach to them here in the U.S. Would you consider writing your own thoughts to him?
Second, if reaching out to the pope is effective, perhaps it is time for Catholics to reach out to their local church leaders, namely priests and bishops. Sharing personal stories to replace philosophical constructs with human faces and relationships might lead to further conversions.
Francis' pen-and-paper revolution is truly radical, and transforms hierarchy into personal relationships. It offers each of us a moment to speak to the pope and bishops as if they are our own parish priests. As the gay and lesbian Catholics of Florence did with their experiences, this is an opportunity to offer our joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties about those matters closest to us. Putting pen to paper is a simple act, but allows each of us to join Francis in answering God's call to rebuild the church. If you write to Francis or local church leaders, please let us know. (Francis' letter-writing revolution requires our involvement.)
This is why Mrs. Randy Engel's open letter to Francis in 2013 provided those who want to read through its graphic content with important factual material concerning the physically disgusting nature of perversity and Bergoglio's own familiarity with some of the most technical terms used by the Homosexual Collective.
Is the use of such terms merely a matter of "pastoral concern?"
When has a true Successor of the Apostles, no less one who claims to be a true Successor of Saint Peter, spoken for public consumption in the terms that Mrs. Engel documents Bergoglio did to Vaticanologist Andrea Tornielli in February of 2012 as reported in Vatican Insider?
Never.
The only basis for human self-identification is that God has given each man a rational, immortal soul created in His very image and likeness, and that His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, died on the wood of the Cross in atonement for human sins in order to redeem it. Catholics, of all, people, of course, are supposed to understand this.
Ever the revolutionary, Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis has adopted the language of the homosexual collective, whose members are filled with bitter anger and hatred at anyone who dares to criticize their "lifestyles" as they are, whether or not they realize it, in rebellion against the very nature that God has implanted within them and have thus done what all revolutionaries do to justify themselves before men: to do violence to language in order to cloud supernatural and natural truth with a fog of irrationality and sentimentality.
It is shameful that one conciliar official after another has adopted this language, thereby conceding that one can identify himself on the basis of the inclination to and/or the commission of perverse sins against nature and the Sixth and Ninth Commandments and that civil society and must treat such self-identification as a legitimate basis for social interaction and legal protection under various "civil rights" statutes and ordinances.
Then again, obviously, many conciliar officials, not a few of them afflicted with perversity themselves, have gone of their way created, fostered and promote a culture that has sustained and propagated the entire agenda of homosexual collective, including "marriage" and, quite importantly, persecuting anyone who criticizes sodomy for what it is. There has been the systematic recruitment, retention and promotion of homosexuals through the nooks and crannies of the conciliar structures, including its hierarchy, such as it is, and within parishes, schools, universities, colleges, seminaries, professional schools, religious houses and houses of so-called "spiritual formation." I suggest that those who have any doubt about this fact should consider the massive amount of documented evidence that Mrs. Randy Engel amassed in The Rite of Sodomy, which has an entire chapter devoted to the horros of "New Ways Ministry," welcomed as it is at this time by the conciliar revolutionaries in the Vatican itself. (Material excerpted from that chapter was updated and adapted for publication four years ago on the Rewew America website. The material can be found below in the appendix.)
Thus it is that the counterfeit church of concilairism, reflecting its "openness to the world" and its falsehoods, has bought into the ideology of the homosexual collective by building it into programs that are taught to presbyters, teachers and children, doing so with an special application to "touching" and expressions of "affection" when the problem of clergy abuse that has exploded into full public view in the past twelve years now has been caused by the creation of an entire environment that is friendly to perversity. Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis is simply saying, therefore, what he has been conditioned to say by the whole rotten ambiance of conciliarism. He is a creature of error and licentiousness, believing that the only "sins" one can commit revovle around being "rigid" in one's "positions" and to be "clear-cut" in one's thinking about truth and heresy, moral right and moral wrong.
Our true popes condemned heresy and error. They condemned moral wrong for what it is without any "nuancing" of issues.
So have our saints, including Saint Peter Damian and Pope Leo IX.
Saint Peter Damian's Book of Gommorha explained the detestable nature of the sin of Sodom, something that Mrs. Engel made clear in The Rite of Sodomy:
According to Damian, the vice of sodomy "surpasses the enormity of all others," because:
"Without fail, it brings death to the body and destruction to the soul. It pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, and gives entrance to the devil, the stimulator of lust. It leads to error, totally removes truth from the deluded mind ... It opens up hell and closes the gates of paradise ... It is this vice that violates temperance, slays modesty, strangles chastity, and slaughters virginity ... It defiles all things, sullies all things, pollutes all things ... This vice excludes a man from the assembled choir of the Church ... it separates the soul from God to associate it with demons. This utterly diseased queen of Sodom renders him who obeys the laws of her tyranny infamous to men and odious to God... She strips her knights of the armor of virtue, exposing them to be pierced by the spears of every vice ... She humiliates her slave in the church and condemns him in court; she defiles him in secret and dishonors him in public; she gnaws at his conscience like a worm and consumes his flesh like fire. ... this unfortunate man (he) is deprived of all moral sense, his memory fails, and the mind's vision is darkened. Unmindful of God, he also forgets his own identity. This disease erodes the foundation of faith, saps the vitality of hope, dissolves the bond of love. It makes way with justice, demolishes fortitude, removes temperance, and blunts the edge of prudence. Shall I say more?"
No, dearest St. Peter Damian, I think not.
Like every saint before him, and every saint that will ever come after him, St. Peter Damian exhorts the cleric caught in the vice of sodomy to repent and reform his life and in the words of the Blessed Apostle Paul, "Wake up from your sleep and rise from the dead, and Christ will revive (enlighten) you." (Eph 5:14) In a remarkable affirmation of the Gospel message, he warns against the ultimate sin of despairing of God's mercy and the necessity of fasting and prayer to subdue the passions:
"... beware of drowning in the depths of despondency. Your heart should beat with confidence in God's love and not grow hard and impenitent, in the face of your great crime. It is not sinners, but the wicked who should despair; it is not the magnitude of one's crime, but contempt of God that dashes one's hopes."
Then, in one of the most beautiful elocutions on the grandeur of priestly celibacy and chastity ever written, Damian reminds the wayward cleric or monk of the special place reserved in Heaven for those faithful priests and monks who have willingly forsaken all and made themselves eunuchs for Christ's sake. Their names shall be remembered forever because they have given up all for the love of God, he says.
One of the very interesting historical sidebars to Damian's treatise is that he made no preference to the popular practice of distinguishing "notorious" from "non-notorious" cases of clerical immorality--a policy which can be traced back to the 9th century and the canonical reforms on ecclesiastical and clerical discipline by the great German Benedictine scholar and Archbishop of Mainz, Blessed Maurus Magnentius Rabanus (776?-856). Under this policy, the removal of clerics found guilty of criminal acts including sodomy, depended on whether or not his offense was publicly known, or was carried out and confessed in secret.
In cases that had become "notorious," the offending cleric was defrocked and/or handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. But if his crime was known only to a few persons such as his confessor or religious superior, the offending cleric was privately reprimanded, served a penance and then was permitted to continue at his post, or transferred to a similar post in a different diocese. Given the aggressive and predatory nature of the vice of sodomy, it is highly likely that such a policy contributed to, rather than inhibited, sodomical practices among clerics and religious between the mid-800s and the early 1000s. In any case, it was unlikely that Damian, who openly expressed his condemnation of too lenient canonical regulations related to the punishment of clerical sodomites and was so judicious in preserving the integrity of the priesthood and religious life, would have approved such a policy.
Saints are realists, which is no doubt why St. Peter Damian anticipated that his "small book" which exposes and denounces homosexual practices in all ranks of the clergy including the hierarchy, would cause a great commotion in the Church. And it did.
In anticipation of harsh criticism, the holy monk puts forth his own defense as a 'whistle-blower'. He states that his would-be critics will accuse him of "being an informer and a delator of my brother's crimes," but, he says, he has no fear of either "the hatred of evil men or the tongues of detractors."
Hear, dear reader, the words of St. Peter Damian that come thundering down to us through the centuries at a time in the Church when many shepherds are silent while clerical wolves, some disguised in miters and brocade robes, devour its lambs and commit sacrilege against their own spiritual sons:
"... I would surely prefer to be thrown into the well like Joseph who informed his father of his brothers' foul crime, than to suffer the penalty of God's fury, like Eli, who saw the wickedness of his sons and remained silent. (Sam 2:4) ... Who am I, when I see this pestilential practice flourishing in the priesthood to become the murderer of another's soul by daring to repress my criticism in expectation of the reckoning of God's judgement? ... How, indeed, am I to love my neighbor as myself if I negligently allow the wound, of which I am sure he will brutally die, to fester in his heart? ... "So let no man condemn me as I argue against this deadly vice, for I seek not to dishonor, but rather to promote the advantage of my brother's well-being. "Take care not to appear partial to the delinquent while you persecute him who sets him straight. If I may be pardoned in using Moses' words, 'Whoever is for the Lord, let him stand with me.' (Ezek 32:26)"
As he draws his case against the vice of clerical sodomy to a close, St. Peter Damian pleads with another future saint, Pope Leo IX, urging the Vicar of Christ to use his office to reform and strengthen the decrees of the sacred canons with regard to the disposition of clerical sodomites including religious superiors and bishops who sexually violate their spiritual sons.
Damian asks the Holy Father to "diligently" investigate the four forms of the vice of sodomy cited at the beginning of his treatise and then provides him (Damian) with definitive answers to the following questions by which the "darkness of uncertainty" might be dispelled and an "indecisive conscience" freed from error:
1) Is one who is guilty of these crimes to be expelled irrevocably from holy orders?
2) Whether at a prelate's discretion, moreover, one might mercifully be allowed to function in office?
3) To what extent, both in respect to the methods mentioned above and to the number of lapses, is it permissible to retain a man in the dignity of ecclesiastical office?
4) Also, if one is guilty, what degree and what frequency of guilt should compel him under the circumstances to retire?
Damian closes his famous letter by asking Almighty God to use Pope Leo IX's pontificate "to utterly destroy this monstrous vice" that a prostrate Church may everywhere rise to vigorous stature." (Mrs. Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 53-55)
Does Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis want to destroy this monstrous vice?
Hardly.
He wants to befriend those who attracted to it and to see it "mainstreamed" in society, which is pretty much a fait accompli these days (see, for example, Irreversible By Means Merely Human).
By contrast, consider how Pope Leo IX responded to the report presented to him by Saint Peter Damian:
The approximate date that Damian delivered the Book of Gomorrah to Pope Leo IX is generally held to be the second half of the first year of the pontiff's reign, i.e., mid-1049, although some writers put the date as late as 1051. We do know, absolutely, that the Pope did respond to Damian's concerns, as that response in the form of a lengthy letter (JL 4311; ItPont 4.94f., no.2) is generally attached to manuscripts of the work.
Pope Leo IX opens his letter to "his beloved son in Christ, Peter the hermit," with warm salutations and a recognition of Damian's pure, upright and zealous character. He agrees with Damian that clerics, caught up in the "execrable vice" of sodomy "verily and most assuredly will have no share in his inheritance, from which by their voluptuous pleasures they have withdrawn. " Such clerics, indeed profess, if not in words, at least by the evidence of their actions, that they are not what they are thought to be," he declares.
Reiterating the category of the four forms of sodomy that Damian lists, [59] the Holy Father declares that it is proper that by "our apostolic authority" we intervene in the matter so that "all anxiety and doubt be removed from the minds of your readers".
"So let it be certain and evident to all that we are in agreement with everything your book contains, opposed as it is like water to the fire of the devil," the Pope continues. "Therefore, lest the wantonness of this foul impurity be allowed to spread unpunished, it must be repelled by proper repressive action of apostolic severity, and yet some moderation must be placed on its harshness," he states.
Next, Pope Leo IX gives a detailed explanation of the Holy See's authoritative ruling on the matter.
In light of divine mercy, the Holy Father commands, without contradiction, that those who, of their own free will, have practiced solitary or mutual masturbation or defiled themselves by interfemoral coitus, but who have not done so for any length of time, nor with many others, shall retain their status, after having "curbed their desires" and "atoned for their infamous deeds with proper repentance".
However, the Holy See removes all hope for retaining their clerical status from those who alone or with others for a long time, or even a short period with many, "have defiled themselves by either of the two kinds of filthiness which you have described, or, which is horrible to hear or speak of, have sunk to the level of anal intercourse."
He warns potential critics, that those who dare to criticize or attack the apostolic ruling stand in danger of losing their rank. And so as to make it clear to whom this warning is directed, the Pope immediately adds, "For he who does not attack vice, but deals with it lightly, is rightly judged to be guilty of his death, along with the one who dies in sin."
Pope Leo IX praises Damian for teaching by example and not mere words, and concludes his letter with the beautiful hope that when, with God's help, the monk reaches his heavenly abode, he may reap his rewards and be crowned, "Ö in a sense, with all those who were snatched by you from the snares of the devil."
Clearly, on the objective immorality of sodomical acts, both Damian and Pope Leo IX were in perfect accord with one another. However, in terms of Church discipline, the pope appears to have taken exception with Damian's appeal for the wholesale deposition of all clerics who commit sodomical acts. I say, appears, because I believe that even in the matter of punishing known clerical offenders, both men were more in agreement than not.
Certainly, Damian, who was renown for his exemplary spiritual direction of the novitiates and monks entrusted to his care, was not unaware of certain mitigating circumstances that would diminish if not totally remove the culpability of individuals charged with the crime of sodomy.
For example, as with certain clerical sex abuse cases that have come to light today involving the Society of St. John and the Legionaries of Christ, which the Holy See has yet to investigate, some novices or monks may have been forced or pressured by their superiors to commit such acts. No doubt, it is circumstances such as these that prompted Pope Leo IX to use the term, "who of his own free will" in describing a cleric guilty of sodomy. Also among the four varieties of sodomy Damian discusses in his treatise, he states that interfemoral and anal coitus are to be judged more serious than solitary or mutual masturbation.
All in all, what this writer found to be most remarkable about the pope's letter to Damian, was the absolutist position Pope Leo IX took concerning the ultimate responsibility of the offending cleric's bishop or religious superior. If the latter criticized or attacked this apostolic decree, he risked losing his rank! Prelates who fail to "attack vice, but deal lightly with it," share the guilt and sentence of the one who dies in sin, the pope declared. (Mrs. Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 57-58)
Writing five hundred years after Saint Peter Damian and Pope Leo IX, Pope Saint Pius V explained the just penalty due clerics caught in the act of unnatural vice:
That horrible crime, on account of which corrupt and obscene cities were destroyed by fire through divine condemnation, causes us most bitter sorrow and shocks our mind, impelling us to repress such a crime with the greatest possible zeal.
Quite opportunely the Fifth Lateran Council [1512-1517] issued this decree: "Let any member of the clergy caught in that vice against nature . . . be removed from the clerical order or forced to do penance in a monastery" (chap. 4, X, V, 31). So that the contagion of such a grave offense may not advance with greater audacity by taking advantage of impunity, which is the greatest incitement to sin, and so as to more severely punish the clerics who are guilty of this nefarious crime and who are not frightened by the death of their souls, we determine that they should be handed over to the severity of the secular authority, which enforces civil law.
Therefore, wishing to pursue with the greatest rigor that which we have decreed since the beginning of our pontificate, we establish that any priest or member of the clergy, either secular or regular, who commits such an execrable crime, by force of the present law be deprived of every clerical privilege, of every post, dignity and ecclesiastical benefit, and having been degraded by an ecclesiastical judge, let him be immediately delivered to the secular authority to be put to death, as mandated by law as the fitting punishment for laymen who have sunk into this abyss. (Pope Saint Pius V, Horrendum illud scelus, August 30, 1568.)
Death, not "brotherhood" and "mainstreaming" for the sake of "inclusivity," was what Pope Saint Pius V, faithful to the teaching of Saint Paul the Apostle in his Epistle to the Roman cited above, believed should be imposed on the clergy as well as the laity who were caught in "such an execrable crime" that caused him "such better sorrow" shocked his papal mind as he sought to "repress such a crime with the greatest possible zeal."
Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis and others in the conciliar structures want to provide "brotherhood" and "acceptance."
Just a slightly different approach, wouldn't you say?
A true pope understood the horror of such a detestable sin on the part of the clergy and sought to administer punishment to serve as a medicinal corrective for other priests and to demonstrate to the laity the horrific nature of such a moral crime.
A false "pope"seeks to appear as an agent of mercy when he is actually an apostle of eternal death.
Mind you, I am not suggesting the revival of this penalty in a world where it would not be understood and where the offender would be made a "martyr" for the cause of perversity, only pointing out the fact that the Catholic Church teaches that clerics and others in ecclesiastical authority who are guilty of serious moral crimes are deserving of punishment, not protection, by their bishops. Such is the difference yet again between Catholicism and conciliarism.
It is shameful that anyone would seek to provide a cover for a man who has such disregard for the honor and glory and majesty of the Most Blessed Trinity and who seeks to indemnify sinners in the name of what is nothing other than a false mercy.
As has been noted so frequently on this site in the past two years since Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s ascent to power within the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River, we are witnessing only the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of conciliarism’s false teachings and its sacramentally barren liturgical rites. It was only a matter of time for men who have propagated grave doctrinal errors would come to propagate ever manner of moral error imaginable in the name of a false “mercy” and “tolerance.”
The counterfeit church of conciliarism is a false church. Its "pontiffs" and "bishops" have given us a steady diet of apostasy, blasphemy and sacrilege over the course of the past fifty-five years.
Once again, Antichrist is not going to give his calling card. We are going to have to use the faculty of reason, guided by the sensus Catholicus and the clear teaching of the Catholic Church, to recognize who he his and who has done his bidding for him in advance of his coming.
This truth must be faced squarely by those who have thus far not given away everything (respect, friendships, outlets for the publication of articles, access to media appearances, personal financial security) by continuing to insist what is contrary to the Catholic Faith: that a heretic can sit on the Throne of Saint Peter.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis is a heretic. So have been his predecessors.
Pope Saint Pius X and Pope Pius XII both reminded us that those who treat lightly of the decrees of the Roman curial congregations and who view papal encyclical letters and pronouncements as non-binding as they are not issued ex cathedra that a Catholic is bound by such decrees and statements as are merely reiterations of what is contained in the Faith Itself, which is entirely irreformable:
8. They are free from all blame who treat lightly the condemnations passed by the Sacred Congregation of the Index or by the Roman Congregations. (Pope Saint Pius X, Lamentabili Sane, July 1, 1907.)
In his encyclical letter "Providentissimus Deus," given on November 18, 1893, our predecessor, Leo XIII, of immortal memory, after describing the dignity of Sacred Scripture and commending the study of it, set forth the laws which govern the proper study of the Holy Bible; and having proclaimed the divinity of these books against the errors and calumnies of the rationalists, he at the same time defended them against the false teachings of what is known as the higher criticism, which, as the Pontiff most wisely wrote, are clearly nothing but the commentaries of rationalism derived from a misuse of philology and kindred studies. Our predecessor, too, seeing that the danger was constantly on the increase and wishing to prevent the propagation of rash and erroneous views, by his apostolic letters "Vigilantes studiique memores," given on October 30, 1902, established a Pontifical Council or Commission on Biblical matters, composed of several Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church distinguished for their learning and wisdom, to which Commission were added as consulters a number of men in sacred orders chosen from among the learned in theology and in the Holy Bible, of various nationalities and differing in their methods and views concerning exegetical studies. In so doing the Pontiff had in mind as an advantage most adapted for the promotion of study and for the time in which we live that in this Commission there should be the fullest freedom for proposing, examining and judging all opinions whatsoever, and that the Cardinals of the Commission were not to reach any definite decision, as described in the said apostolic letters, before they had examined the arguments in favor and against the question to be decided, omitting nothing which might serve to show in the clearest light the true and genuine state of the Biblical questions under discussion. Only after all this had been done were the decisions reached to be submitted for the approval of the Supreme Pontiff and then promulgated.
After mature examination and the most diligent deliberations the Pontifical Biblical Commission has happily given certain decisions of a very useful kind for the proper promotion and direction on safe lines of Biblical studies. But we observe that some persons, unduly prone to opinions and methods tainted by pernicious novelties and excessively devoted to the principle of false liberty, which is really immoderate license and in sacred studies proves itself to be a most insidious and a fruitful source of the worst evils against the purity of the faith, have not received and do not receive these decisions with the proper obedience.
Wherefore we find it necessary to declare and to expressly prescribe, and by this our act we do declare and decree that all are bound in conscience to submit to the decisions of the Biblical Commission relating to doctrine, which have been given in the past and which shall be given in the future, in the same way as to the decrees of the Roman congregations approved by the Pontiff; nor can all those escape the note of disobedience or temerity, and consequently of grave sin, who in speech or writing contradict such decisions, and this besides the scandal they give and the other reasons for which they may be responsible before God for other temerities and errors which generally go with such contradictions.
Moreover, in order to check the daily increasing audacity of many modernists who are endeavoring by all kinds of sophistry and devices to detract from the force and efficacy not only of the decree "Lamentabili sane exitu" (the so-called Syllabus), issued by our order by the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition on July 3 of the present year, but also of our encyclical letters "Pascendi dominici gregis" given on September 8 of this same year, we do by our apostolic authority repeat and confirm both that decree of the Supreme Sacred Congregation and those encyclical letters of ours, adding the penalty of excommunication against their contradictors, and this we declare and decree that should anybody, which may God forbid, be so rash as to defend any one of the propositions,