So, people seem to still be talking about the Cardinal Sarah ad orientem thing. For some of the bloggers still attached to the NO it has been taken as a teaching moment, which is a good thing… I guess… People who read some of the Novusordoist “conservative” clerical blogs are perhaps hearing this history for the first time. From this, maybe, some of these people will start further investigations and come to some valuable, salutary conclusions.

I’ve been so long away from Novusordoland that I’m afraid it really did strike me as mostly uninteresting and not very important. The NO is doomed, and the people who follow it to its doom are responsible for their fate.

I’m surprised at the reaction from some of the conservatives, in fact, diving into the tea pot and getting it into a froth. It amazes me – as much as I’m still capable of being “amazed” in my current state of nearly constant low-level rage and disgust at everything related to the Church. Amazement seems like such an innocent reaction, you have to be caught off guard to experience it, so it’s hard for anything to break through the wall of fury.

Anyway, here’s CWR on the issue – I suppose we can call it an ‘issue’- that seems to me to be very close to totally irrelevant.

And my non-reaction to the Cardinal Sarah business is making me wonder about my much stronger reactions to some other things. There was certainly a time, and not that long ago, when I would also have been very interested in such an intervention from a Curial Cardinal. It’s making me realize how far things have gone, both in the Church and in my own life, when I have no interest in it at all.

It reminds me of the time recently, under Benedict, when the Vatican suddenly started paying attention to the antinuns. I’m afraid when I first heard about it, I burst out laughing. This was FOUR DECADES after these people had publicly abandoned the Faith, embraced the occult and Marxism and had already led millions of souls out of the Church and into everlasting perdition, including their own, and had played a lead role in the extermination of Catholicism throughout the western Church. Traitors to the Faith, traitors to their vocations, traitors to Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, openly worshiping demons, and the Vatican sent them a polite little note asking them if they would please, pretty please, be Catholic again. Then when they started screeching like the demons they’re possessed by, the boys inside hopped backwards with a terrified expression, begged them not to get upset, and gave them a lolly.

When the Congregation for Religious and the CDF, under Cardinal Rode and (I think) Levada, announced they were launching an investigation, I’m afraid my response – along with many others – was, “why bother?” The damage has long since been done, the horse has escaped and died of old age.

The absurdity struck everyone about that exercise. The only thing it did was to demonstrate that the things we thought about the men in the Vatican were true. It is staffed by ineffectual, effeminate men afraid to act or be seen to be acting, even in the weakest possible way, to defend Christ’s truth, Christ’s Church, Christ’s flock.

Now we have a new Putative Pope, and the little dramatic farce is replaying itself over issues that ceased to be relevant a decade ago.

But hey, at least they’re catching up!

This is the only thing that I have been able to muster up about Cardinal Sarah and ad orientem. Why is anyone interested in this? It was a liturgical flashpoint. It was an issue upon which the future of the Church hung, indeed. Years and years ago, Anne Roche Muggeridge was asked in an interview, if she could have one thing restored, what would it be, and she said, “ad orientem“. But that was in the ’80s. The wheel has turned a few times since then. The bird has flown. The ship has sailed, hit the ice and sunk.

The Church followed the Novusordo right over the cliff. Why do we want to go down there and pick through the corpses to find someone still alive to the Faith and ask him if he wants the priest at Mass to face him or face the altar?

The only thing that raises my ire about any of it is the complete disconnection of this good man, this cardinal who still thinks the Church is still alive and the Faith is still practiced by anyone in the NO world. He still thinks the rules apply. Faced with everything that has happened in the last five years, he still thinks the rules apply.

I’ve spent the last couple of days wondering why I had such a furious reaction to the stuff these anonymous theologians are doing in the face of the Bergoglio crisis. I’ve spoken with a few of them privately about the initiative, and they’re good men. They’re doing what they think they can do…I guess…

Perhaps the thing that has irritated me about it most is the apparent lack of acknowledgement of just how far things have gone. These are people who think the rule of law applies in the Church. That they can play by the rules and it will have an effect. To be sure, not all of them actually think they’re going to have an effect for realzies, but they all seem to believe that there is still some kind of point to acting according to the dictates in canon law and elsewhere governing how the game is supposed to be played.

Oh to be sure, we all know that those rules apply to them. They know that when their identities inevitably become known – as they are already known to the cardinals to whom the letter was addressed – those evil men will not hesitate to use the Rules to squash them like bugs. (And any of them silly enough to have thought that by keeping the letter secret they could avoid this inevitable fate are simply not worth the time to correct.) But that is only because the grinning demons who occupy the churchmen in question have no qualms at all about using the law as a weapon against the Faithful. As willing as they are to use their raw power, and to hell with the rules. In all these decades since the Asteroid, are there really – really – still good men who think that the Church still functions according to these rules?

I actually had a conversation with one of them the other day – electronic communication in our age! Golly! – and was accused of speaking … ahem… intemperately. I was being injust to the people who were trying to do this thing … whatever it is. And no. He’s right. I wasn’t polite about it. I’ve been polite about this stuff for all the time I worked in official capacities for official groups. I played by the rules for a long, long time. And here we are. Here. We. Are.

I think I understand now the source of my frustrated fury. I have been watching closely, very very closely, the behaviour of this pope and his junta. And frankly, there’s nothing new here. Why, after all this time and all these corruptions and distortions of the Faith is there still anyone who clings to the illusion that the Church still functions according to any rules? Everything that’s happening now is in a discernible line of logic with what has gone on since the ’70s. This pope and his plans are simply the next logical step in the process. Does it make sense to imagine that by following the Rules a real Thing will be accomplished in the face of this demonstration of raw power? And where were these people when all the outrages of the last fifty years were being visited upon the innocents?

People, they destroyed the Mass! They eradicated the liturgy! They looted the sanctuaries of every church in Christendom! They, quite literally, raped the children. They’ve been lying to and abusing the faithful for 50 years! And the pirates who have inherited this whimpering and broken prisoner of a Church are ready now to administer the coup de grace. And you think now, after all that, an appropriate response is a polite letter asking please if it’s not too much bother, your holiness, could you consider maybe doing your job and defending the Faith?

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There is no rule of law in the Vatican.**

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There is no rule of law in the Vatican.**

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There is no rule of law in the Vatican.**

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There is no rule of law in the Vatican.**

Quite frankly, the rules haven’t been of interest to the Novus ordo establishment for decades. If an existing rule stands in their way, they simply get rid of it… if ignoring it becomes impossible.

It’s that there is no point at all in any of this and the waste of effort is infuriating. But more than that, I’m furious that these people are cooperating in a false premise. They are acting as though there are still rules that anyone follows. The incredible fantasy that the situation still admits of an action based on The Rules; that the only people who are, apparently, doing anything are doing it in a way that demonstrates prima facie that they really have no idea at all about the realities of the situation.

We. are. past. this. point. The uselessness, the utter futility of playing this game, and the fact that this is the only thing being done… I don’t know. What did I expect? Did I think that the cardinals would suddenly get a burst of courage and denounce Francis as a heretic and an antipope? Call a press conference and call him to task?

I was thinking of analogies today. It’s as if a group of well-educated, besuited diplomats were to go to South Sudan to confront the slavering beasts who are turning what’s left of that country into a death camp and started quoting to them seventh century Byzantine Christian legal codes, exhorting the warlords to obey the law of God.

The incredible incongruity – and utter futility – of a group of civilized men trying to pacify a gang of barbaric despotic thugs by appealing to the rule of law seems to have been lost on everyone else.

And here’s the even worse irony; they know it’s futile. I’ve been told by some of them that, if nothing else, they wanted to be able to say, “at least we did something” . And yes, I’m sure that when all things are restored in Christ, future generations of school children will be fascinated by the historical footnote of 45 theologians confronting Bergoglio’s gang of ecclesiastical mafiosi and be duly impressed.

Meanwhile, we’re here and now and futile gestures, no matter how nobly intended, are actually worth exactly…

In the case of the antinuns, LCWR laughed at them. They flicked their wrists and mobilized their media troops and the cowards inside scuttled for cover. And those were the good guys. In the case of Cardinal Sarah’s incongruous call for ad orientem worship – while the boat is sinking – will receive exactly the same response.

People have compared this pope with Pius IX. The author of the Syllabus, history records, started his reign being insufficiently stern with the slavering wolves in Europe trying to overthrow the Christian order. He got his wake-up call when he and the bishops were physically chased out of Rome by armed revolutionaries during Vatican I. A few interesting historical footnotes later and Pius had wised up enough to issue the Syllabus.

I have – yes, really – had people suggest that Francis would at some point have a similar Scrooge moment and realize the error of backing this horse and turn back to doing what he is supposed to be doing. The person who made this suggestion to me was lucky we weren’t in the same room when he made it, because there would have been objects flying.

What is it going to take to make people understand the realities? This isn’t an honestly misguided man making an error. This creature wants the things that Pius spent the rest of his pontificate fighting. Francis is the chosen man of a group of devils who will not stop until there is no more Church, no more Faith, no more Sacrifice on any altar.

So, you will ask me what do we do? If following the rules is absurd and futile, what is there left to do?

I’m sorry not to have a good answer.

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