GERMANY'S O.S. T-SHIRT WOULD FIT NZ CHURCH

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"How dare you!"

I make no apologies for borrowing from the lexicon of poor, angry little poster girl for 'climate change', Greta Thunberg - who insists on no carbon production. At all.

But it's Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, Archbishop of Vienna, Austria, to whom I address these words. 

"I wonder what possessed you, Your Eminence; what induced you to cover the high altar of your 12th-century St Stephen's Cathedral - your 'cathedra', or seat - with a much larger than life woman's long-sleeved purple T-shirt?"

Truly. I kid you not. To give you an idea how large, it's 80 sq m of fabric. It masquerades, according to the cathedral website, as a modern Lenten veil (Fastentuch). Yeah right.

The Austrian 'artist' who 'created' the oversize t-shirt is also known for his depictions of naked men, complete with genitals, in various positions. His name is Erwin Wurm. I guess with a name like that, we're not surprised that he over-compensates for his under-valued masculinity.

To appreciate the scale of this blasphemy you need the visual, and here it is: 



And before you women start going, oh what a gorgeous colour, beautiful fabric, where did he get it, we need to know a little of this guy's back story. In addition to the pix of middle-aged naked chaps on his website, Erwin the Wurm is known also for images which mock priests and religious.

Are you dumbfounded yet? How can the Austrians stomach this, you ask? What does a Viennese like Alexander Tschugguel, who threw the Pachamama idols in the Tiber, think? I don't want to put ideas into his head, but will he perhaps steal into St Stephen's at crack of dawn with an extension ladder and a pair of scissors - and, we hope, his camera?

The Austrians, I suggest, have arrived at this pretty pass very gradually, over the years since Vatican II, by inuring themselves just like we have in NZ, to abuses like female 'Eucharistic Ministers' (yes, I was one of them) surging forth from the congregation at the 'Lamb of God' to take hold of the Most Precious Body of the Son of God with their fingers and hand it out to Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Those good ladies took a fair bit of persuading - by their pastors - to do it, and it was a bit of a shock at the time, but we all got used to it. 

That was the thin end of one of many wedges in the Vatican/Jesuit toolbox. Its thick end is women priests.

Oh, that's drawing a very long bow, you say. Maybe. But I intuit that Herr Wurm's 'artwork' of a woman's t-shirt draped over the high altar of Sacrifice - for two thousand years exclusively a male domain - is a great big, tasteless, purple hint of what's to come. 
Let's not be gulled any more, people. This is a somewhat unsubtle symbol of women's usurpation of the place assigned by God to men in the Church, as in society as a whole. 

I could wade deep into murky psychological waters and speculate on Herr Wurm's distorted self-image and apparent personal rejection of his masculinity as a manifestation of the rejection and dumbing-down of men by the ladies of the liberal left in the media. 

I could wade into political waters likewise and read in this T-shirt the socialist agenda of aforementioned women who seized on contraception and then abortion and sterilisation as means to the end of destroying their fertility, the family and the future of the human race, all to achieve the pseudo 'equality' which in practice means their supremacy.

Oh, now she's getting carried away, you say. Pope Francis has said no to women priests. But Pope Francis says no when he really means yes. At least, that's what Cardinal Oswald Gracias, one of the Pope's C6 Council of Cardinals and head of the Indian bishops' conference, thinks. 

Because a couple of days ago Cardinal Gracias claimed the path to married priests is still "open". Pope Francis, he says, is "very clever" (I take this to be in comparison with his own good self) in "endorsing the final document" of the Amazon Synod, which endorsed ordination of married men who are already deacons, and proposed further study on the 'female diaconate'.

Cardinal Gracias wants "greater responsibilities for women in the Catholic Church". And what Modernist cardinals want, Modernist cardinals get, right? At least they do under this papacy.  

Have these particular cardinals - Schonborn and Gracias -  got a death wish? Or are they just comedians? A t-shirt as Lenten veiling of a cathedral's high altar would be funny if it weren't blasphemous, but get this: +Gracias says - of the Pope who has divided the Church - "He's got to carry everybody with him ... we go slower than we would like to go because of that". 

Dear Cardinal Gracias, how slow can you go? I mean also how low can you go? How long will it take you, Schonborn, Marx (does he have a famous grandad?) and the gang to complete your base, ignoble intent to undermine the Church's foundations, the Sacraments?  

Oh well, if you do yourself out of your job by white-anting your Employer, you're guaranteed a future as a stand-up comic. "We have not," says the cardinal, employing the papal or is it the royal, we, "applied our mind to it."

Here's the thing: in his post-synodal document (no. 94, I think it might go up to no. 1004), the pope says, "women who have a central part to play in Amazonian communities should have access to positions, including ecclesial service, that do not entail Holy Orders and that can better signify the role that is theirs ... these services entail public recognition and a commission from the bishop." 

To clarify: so in the Amazon lady bus drivers, for example, should be able to get positions, including driving church buses, without becoming priests, and signs on their buses saying 'Lady Bus Driver' - and a commission from the bishop. Oh, and it has to be done in "a way that reflects their womanhood". Would 'Lady Bus Driver' fill the bill? Maybe make it pink ...

Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez, papal ghostwriter and theological adviser, chimes in with the suggestion of a new 'Amazonian rite' as part of a 'synodal novelty' established by the pope. 

He and his cohorts just don't get it. The Church cannot be about 'novelty' and 'surprises'; The Church is the Truth which cannot be changed: She the Bride of "Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today; and the same for ever" (Heb 13:8).

We haven't finished with German cardinals yet (is there something in the Teutonic holy water?) Enter stage far left, Cardinal Walter Kasper, lurking in the wings since 2019, when he suggested another 'novelty' that has somehow found its way almost word for word into the pope's post-synodal exhortation. 

Kasper envisaged "a female ministry without ordination". He told LifeSite that women could give out Holy Communion, hold a Liturgy of the Word and "even rule over parishes". 

Well, here in 'progressive' Aotearoa NZ, we do all that already. Look, we're ahead of Germany, even! Behold the wedge effect on us Kiwis, we whom Gordon McLauchlan once called, with plenty of justification, "smiling zombies, lazy and smug" (The Passionless People (1976).





A recent comment from Cardinal Gerhard Mueller seems pertinent to the pic above, of Cardinal Kasper chatting with His Holiness. (+Mueller, a German but with apparent immunity to Teutonic holy water, has the signal honour of being sacked by Pope Francis as Prefect for the Congregation of the Faith, for defending Church doctrine on Communion for adulterers.) 

“The primacy of the Pope is being undermined by the sycophants and careerists at the papal court," says +Mueller. He referred to famous 16th century theologian Melchior Cano:

“Those who defend blindly and indiscriminately any judgment whatsoever of the Supreme Pontiff concerning every matter weaken the authority of the Apostolic See; they do not support it; they subvert it; they do not fortify it…. Peter has no need of our lies; he has no need of our adulation.” 

+Mueller has also made a strong defence of the three-fold mission of the priest – to preach, to sanctify, and to govern. 

I believe the uproar over a female diaconate was a red herring intended to distract the faithful's attention from what's really going down. Now that we're inured to the above goings-on, we're nicely softened up for a deeper insertion of the wedge, with Cardinal Kasper's inspiration of 'special garments' for these women, and once they're dressed up, as the pope states in Querida Amazonia, their "administration of) certain sacraments and a liturgical blessing for women". 

This presumably entails more than being told peremptorily, as I was by my PP, "You can be a 'Eucharistic Minister' "(the extent of my catechesis). In Querida Amazonia the pope refers to "public recognition and a commission from the bishop". Wouldn't that be nice? Can you not see women lining up to be measured for their vestments a la Anglican 'vicars' and commissioned by the bishop?

So forget about a 'female diaconate', people, because now it's embarrassingly been proven there never was such a thing historically, as Cardinal Kasper admits. But then in the next breath he acknowledges that "women have many functions in the Church that go far beyond those female deacons (who never existed) had in the first millenium."  So let's just call the same thing by different name. 

The Vatican spin-doctors will be working on it, because as Austen Ivereigh, papolater-in-chief,  said on Feb 12 in The Tablet, this new lay ministry could be “much bigger" (than the female diaconate). 
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/cardinal-kasper-predicted-pope-francis-would-introduce-female-ministry-heres-how-it-happened

Ask yourself, whatever could that be, which is 'much bigger than the female diaconate'? Ivereigh writes: “The really radical move... is in paragraphs 99 - 103, which best reflect Francis’s discernment of where God’s gift of creative 'new' thinking is making itself felt (as if God has changed His thinking to suit the Modernists) .... One of the (Amazon) synod’s organisers told me that this was 'much bigger than the female diaconate', given the number of women who lead Amazon communities; and also better reflected the desire of those women to have their authority recognised but without being clericalised.”

“For those with eyes to see and ears to hear,” Ivereigh continues, “the Pope is not just following a path out of the debate over the viri probati, but looking to a whole new kind of female-specific leadership in the Church.

"The Pope asks us "to transcend limited perspectives and ‘pragmatic’ solutions mired in partial approaches, in order to seek paths of inculturation that are broader and bolder ... "People may see this as the major fruit of the Amazonian synod.”

But Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes - a retired curial cardinal, another German but one living in Rome and obviously with acquired immunity to the Teutonic holy water, has queered not just Ivereigh's pitch but the Pope's. 

Cardinal Cordes detects in Querida Amazonia a footnote (remember Amoris Laetitia, anyone?) which he says quotes canon law in a defective way. He rejects the notion of separating the priesthood from its governing mission proposed by the Pope, by which one Professor Michael Bohnke*triumphantly declares that Pope Francis has "cracked a clerical monopoly". 

Not so fast. The Pope had referred, in footnote 136, to canon 517§2, which gives a bishop the possibility of tasking laymen with the participation in putative leadership roles in the field of pastoral care. 

But this canon actually states that: “If, because of a lack of priests, the diocesan bishop has decided that participation in the exercise of the pastoral care of a parish is to be entrusted to a deacon, to another person who is not a priest, or to a community of persons, (the bishop) is to appoint some priest who, provided with the powers and faculties of a pastor, is to direct the pastoral care"(emphasis added). 

See how we, the faithful of the Palmerston North Diocese, should be praying the Rosary and exposing the Blessed Sacrament for the intention of a holy bishop! But no: at St Brigid's, Pahiatua for example, the daily Rosary has been canned. Might we ask why?

I did ask, and was told a parish worthy has claimed that "people want to pray in their own way", and not at Adoration. There you have it: anthropocentrism, rampant.

And at St Joseph's, Waipukurau this morning, on the First Sunday in Lent - season of mortification, fasting, penance and prayer - Father told us once again (Sunday after Sunday, same heresy) that we're all going to Heaven and there's nothing we can do to earn it. 

No, of course we can't earn it, but we must "work out our salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12).   



*Let us note that Prof Bohnke writes for the German bishops’ news website Katholisch.de., managed until the resignation of Father Hans Langendörfer, one of the most influential figures in the German Church, widely credited with running the 'synodal path' behind the scenes - and incidentally, associated with a pornography scandal. Fr Langendörfer announced his resignation as head of the secretariat of the German bishops’ conference - and a loss of 200,000 Catholics to the Church in 2018. Gott in Himmel! 
We note also that Father Langendörfer is a Jesuit ...

https://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/father-hans-langendoerfer-key-german-church-leader-resigns-position