Vol 10 Issue 38 ~ Editor: Rev. Fr. Courtney Edward Krier
September 23, 2017 ~ Saint Linus, opn!

1. Is the Chair of Peter Vacant? An Argument for Sedevacantism
2. Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
3. Our Lady of Ransom
4. Family and Marriage
5. Articles and notices

Dear Reader:
With the activities happening here in Las Vegas, I have not been able to prepare a commentary otherwise,
as always, enjoy the readings and commentaries provided for your benefit. —The Editor ________________

Is the Chair of Peter Vacant?

An Argument for Sedevacantism

by Rev. Courtney Edward Krier

Fourth Contradiction: Unity or Disunity?
(Continued)
Every knowledgeable Catholic knows how the Jews hate and revile Pius XII who did so much during World War II to save Jews from deportation and concentration camps. He did so much the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Anton Zoller, converted to Catholicism with his family (cf.http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/196727/the-apostasy-of-rabbi-zolli.)The Jews could never forgive this (remembering the Edgardo Mortaro episode) and is reflected in the recent decisions of the Conciliar Church to forbid converting Jews.

Wiltgen provides this episode:

Two weeks before the opening of the third session, on August 31, 1964, I received a visit from Dr. Joseph Lichten, director of the Intercultural Affairs Department of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, He was deeply concerned over the fact that the phrase exculpating the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ had now been deleted from the Council document, and maintained that the phrase in question was the most important part of the document as far as the Jews were concerned. He had visited various cardinals in Europe on the matter, he told me, and was busy making contacts in Rome. He said further that Cardinal Bea was preparing a special amendment to be presented in the Council hall “on this unfortunate deletion.”
At the eighty-eighth General Congregation, on September 25, 1964, Cardinal Bea gave a report on the revised declaration. The problem, he said, was “whether and in what manner the Jewish people, as a people, are to be considered guilty of the condemnation and death of Christ the Lord.” He disagreed strongly with those who maintained that the chief cause of anti-Semitism was the aforesaid guilt of the Jewish people. He explained that there were many reasons for anti-Semitism which were not of a religious, but of a national, political, psychological, social, or economic nature.
In his theological exposition, Cardinal Bea said that “the leaders of the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem” had been guilty of the death of Christ, as the efficient cause in the historical order; denied that “the entire Jewish people of that time, as a people,” could be declared guilty for what the leaders in Jerusalem had done; and stated that this guiltlessness of the Jews as a people at the time of Christ was all the more true with regard to the Jews of today. The Jewish leaders who condemned Christ to death, he said, were clearly not formally guilty of deicide, since Christ himself (Luke 23:34), St. Peter (Acts3:17), and St. Paul (Acts 13:27) had all said that those leaders had acted without full knowledge of Christ’s divinity. (Op. cit., 172)

Augustine Bea, then, acted on behalf of Jewish Americans and the B’nai Brith to obtain a change in the doctrine of the Church.
Regarding ecumenism, Augustine Bea repeatedly quotes from the Instructio de motione oecumenica (Instructions on the Ecumenical Movement) of December 20, 1949. This followed a Monitum, or Warning, named Cum compertum, of June 5, 1948, which is here presented:

Warning:
Mixed gatherings of non-Catholics with Catholics have been reportedly held in various places, where things pertaining to the Faith have been discussed against the prescriptions of the Sacred Canons and without previous permission of the Holy See. Therefore all are reminded that according to the norm of Canon 1325 § 3 laypeople as well as clerics both secular and regular are forbidden to attend these gatherings without the aforesaid permission. It is however much less licit for Catholics to summon and institute such kind of gatherings. Let therefore Ordinaries urge all to serve these prescriptions accurately.
These are to be observed with even stronger force of law when it comes to gatherings called “ecumenical”, which laypeople and clerics may not attend at all without previous consent of the Holy See.
Moreover, since acts of mixed worship have also been posed not rarely both within and without the aforesaid gatherings, all are once more warned that any communication in sacred affairs is totally forbidden according to the norm of Canons 1258 and 731, § 2.
Given at Rome, at the premises of the Holy Office, on June 5th 1948.
Petrus Vigorita, Notary
(cf. Acta Apostolicae Sedis XL (1948), p. 257.; Periodica)

Canon 1325, § 3. Reads: Let Catholics beware lest they have debates or conferences, especially public ones, with non-Catholics without having come to the Holy See or, if the case is urgent, to the local Ordinary.

In the Canon Law Digest there is documented the decrees of the Popes and Holy Office pertaining to this Canon and Church teaching forbidding Catholics joining with non-Catholics as though they were Christian Churches, reserving any contact to bringing non-Catholics back to the Church (Catholic) and forbidding absolutely any participation in their services or allowing them to receive the Sacraments.
In a decree of July 4, 1919, regarding the Society for Union of Christendom

The Holy Office was asked:
Whether the instructions of this Supreme Sacred Congregation, of 16 Sept., 1864, regarding the participation of Catholics in a certain society founded in London “to procure the union of Christendom,” are to be applied and obeyed by the faithful also in. regard to their participation in meetings or conferences of whatever kind, public or private, called by non-Catholics for the purpose of promoting the union of all churches claiming to be Christian.
Reply. In the affirmative, and ordering the publication in the AAS of the letter referred to and also of the letter “to certain English Puseyites,” of 8 Nov., 1865. (I, 619; cf. AAS 11-309)

The same response was given for the Lausanne Conference for Christian Unity by the Holy Office on July 8, 1927:

On the occasion of the conference which was to be held at Lausanne, in Switzerland, Aug. 3-21, 1927, the Holy Office was asked:
Whether Catholics are allowed to belong to or to favor conventions, meetings, conferences, or associations of non-Catholics which have for their purpose to unite all those who call themselves Christians in one religious federation.
Reply. In the negative; and the Decree of the Holy Office of 4 July, 1919, regarding the participation of Catholics in the society “for the union of Christendom” is absolutely to be observed.
This reply approved and ordered published, by His Holiness, Pius XI.
(Ibid., 620; cf. AAS 19-278.)

Pope Pius XI then wrote the Encyclical, Mortalium animos (January 6, 1928; cf. AAS 20-5) that definitively condemns pan-Christianity and forbidding Catholics to participate. It was necessary, for Bouscaren, in Canon Law Digest addends the following:

The annotations in Periodica recall in connection with the Encyclical, the following facts:
1. The World’s Parliament of Religions, to which delegates from all religions of the world were invited, and which was held in Chicago in 1893, was opened by Cardinal Gibbons, who recited the Lord’s Prayer.
2. Pope Leo XIII, on 18 Sept., 1895, in a letter to the then Apostolic Delegate to the United States, later Cardinal Satolli, temperately discountenanced participation by Catholics in such promiscuous religious meetings. [Acta Leonis XIII, Vol. 15, p. 323.]
3. Beginning in 1910, the Episcopal Church in the United States sponsored a World Conference of Christian churches. In 1914, the Secretary of this Conference, in a letter to Cardinal Gasparri, asked the prayers of the Holy Father for its success, and received a gracious reply. In 1916, His Holiness, Benedict XV, [Brief of 25 Feb., 1916; AAS 9-61] gave pontifical approval to the “Church Unity Octave,” Jan. 18-25, and enriched with indulgences certain prayers for the true unity of Christendom. In 1919, delegates from the Episcopal “World Conference” called upon the Holy Father and were graciously received; but at the same time were informed that the Catholic doctrine on the unity of the visible Church of Christ made it impossible for the Pope to join in their meetings.
4. The attitude of the Holy See toward the “society for the union of Christendom” which was formed in London in 1857, was one of strict non-participation; and this attitude is continued in regard to later efforts of the same sort.
5. The so-called “Malines Conversations,” begun in 1921 and participated in by Lord Halifax. and Cardinal Mercier, were discontinued in 1926; in 1927, Cardinal Van Roey, who had assisted at the meetings as Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Malines for Cardinal Mercier, informed Lord Halifax that there was little prospect of the “Conversations” being resumed.
6. On the occasion of the Lausanne Conference, 1927, the Holy Office repeated the prohibition against participation by Catholics.”
7. The efforts of the Roman Pontiffs for the attainment and maintenance of Christian unity in the true sense, have been constant since the time of St. Peter. (Canon Law Digest I, 621-622)

Pius XI, in his Encyclical on the Promotion of True Christian Unity teaches:

2. A similar object is aimed at by some, in those matters which concern the New Law promulgated by Christ our Lord. For since they hold it for certain that men destitute of all religious sense are very rarely to be found, they seem to have founded on that belief a hope that the nations, although they differ among themselves in certain religious matters, will without much difficulty come to agree as brethren in professing certain doctrines, which form as it were a common basis of the spiritual life. For which reason conventions, meetings and addresses are frequently arranged by these persons, at which a large number of listeners are present, and at which all without distinction are invited to join in the discussion, both infidels of every kind, and Christians, even those who have unhappily fallen away from Christ or who with obstinacy and pertinacity deny His divine nature and mission.Certainly such attempts can nowise be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy, since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgment of His rule. Not only are those who hold this opinion in error and deceived, but also in distorting the idea of true religion they reject it, and little by little, turn aside to naturalism and atheism, as it is called; from which it clearly follows that one who supports those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them, is altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion.
4. Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity? Who would dare to say that he loved Christ, unless he worked with all his might to carry the desires of Him, Who asked His Father that His disciples might be “one.”[1] And did not the same Christ will that His disciples should be marked out and distinguished from others by this characteristic, namely that they loved one another: “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another”?[2] All Christians, they add, should be as “one”: for then they would be much more powerful in driving out the pest of irreligion, which like a serpent daily creeps further and becomes more widely spread, and prepares to rob the Gospel of its strength. These things and others that class of men who are known as pan-Christians continually repeat and amplify; and these men, so far from being quite few and scattered, have increased to the dimensions of an entire class, and have grouped themselves into widely spread societies, most of which are directed by non-Catholics, although they are imbued with varying doctrines concerning the things of faith. This undertaking is so actively promoted as in many places to win for itself the adhesion of a number of citizens, and it even takes possession of the minds of very many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed.
(To be continued)
————————–
Fr. Leonard Goffine
The Ecclesiastical Year (1880)

INSTRUCTION ON THE SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

…

[Message clipped] View entire message