Pope Francis Suppresses the Prayers of the Faithful

Pope Francis is suppressing the Traditional Latin Mass at the same time the Chinese Communist Party is suppressing Tibetan Buddhism, and for the same stated reason.

August 4, 2021

A lot of ink is now being spilled in Catholic circles about a new Motu Proprio — an Apostolic Letter — of Pope Francis announced on Friday, July 16, 2021, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Pope Francis has placed severe restrictions on celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass.

Effective immediately, his restrictions include a mandate barring newly organized celebrations of the TLM and its celebration in any parish church. Further, newly ordained priests will need the written consent of their bishops who in turn must consult the Holy See before approval is granted to celebrate the Traditional (Extraordinary) Form of the Mass.

Pope Francis has imposed these restrictions without explanation in open contradiction of a 2014 Motu Proprio of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who permitted celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass without preconditions and without consent from a bishop. Some of the best early reaction to this new and draconian development has come from Father John Zuhlsdorf (Father Z’s Blog, “Reactions to Traditionis Custodes.”)

“Fathers ... change nothing, do nothing differently for now. It is not rational to leap around without mapping the mine field we are entering. Keep calm and carry on.

“Lay people ... be temperate. Set your faces like flint. When you are on fire, it avails you nothing to run around flapping your arms. Drop and roll and be calm.

“To those of you who have put your heart and goods and hopes into supporting and building the Traditional Latin Mass, thank you. Do not for a moment despair or wonder if what you did was worth the effort, time, cost and suffering. It was worth it. It still is.”

— Father John Zuhlsdorf, July 16, 2021

Father Z adds pointedly, “I am forced to remark that the vulgarity of this document is matched only by its cruelty.”

For my part, I cannot help but wonder what Pope Francis might have been thinking at Mass just two days later as he listened to the First Reading on the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Was he at all conscious that Catholics all over the world were hearing the same rebuke from the Prophet Jeremiah that he heard that Sunday?

“Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the Lord. Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, against the shepherds who shepherd my people: You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them, but ... I myself will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands and bring them back to their meadow ... I will appoint shepherds for them who will shepherd them so that they need no longer fear and tremble, and none shall be missing, says the Lord.”

— Jeremiah 23:1-6

A Catholic Unraveling in Germany

I have been searching for a more panoramic map of the mine field Father Z says we are now entering, and I think I may have found some of its initial rumblings. While reading Volume Two of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell, I came upon his entry for 9 August 2019, the feast of Edith Stein, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I wrote about her once in "Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz."

Edith Stein was German by birth. In his book, Cardinal Pell advises readers to seek her intercession for the Church in Germany. Cardinal Pell quoted Cardinal Gerhard Muller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

“The Catholic Church [in Germany] is going down. Leaders there are not aware of the real problems. [They are] self-centered and concerned primarily with sexual morality, celibacy, and women priests. They don’t speak about God, Jesus Christ, grace, the sacraments, and faith, hope, and love.”

— p. 75

It gets worse. Later in Prison Journal, in an entry dated 16 October 2019, Cardinal Pell wrote candidly about the German Catholic Church fears of the possibility of schism that have been raised there. If allowed to happen, such a break would sweep much of Europe. Cardinal Pell referred to a Catholic Culture article by Philip Lawler entitled, “Who Benefits from All This Talk of Schism?” (September 17, 2019):

“Lawler argues that the prospect of a schism is remote, but Pope Francis has spoken calmly about such a prospect, saying he is not frightened by it, something Lawler believes is frightening in itself.”

— Prison Journal Volume Two, p. 214

Cardinal Pell spoke of earlier confidence about the unlikelihood of a schism, but acknowledged that “the odds against it have shortened.” He added, while again citing Philip Lawler:

“Not surprisingly, the New York Times has been writing about the prospect of a schism by the John Paul and Benedict followers in the United States, the Gospel Catholics ... I believe Lawler’s diagnosis is correct when he points out that the topic of schism has been raised by the ‘busiest and most aggressive online defenders’ of Pope Francis who ‘recognize that they cannot engineer the radical changes they want without precipitating a split in the Church. So they want orthodox Catholics to break away first, leaving [progressives] free to enact their own revolutionary agenda.’”

— Prison Journal Volume Two, p. 214-215

It was that final sentence that caught my attention after hearing these new restrictions imposed by Pope Francis on the Traditional Latin Mass. Are we now witnessing the opening salvo of such a manipulated agenda? Is there a move under way to antagonize conservative and traditional Catholics into breaking away?

The Pope and the Chinese Communist Party

I am certain this was not by design, but on the day after this announcement by Pope Francis, the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal carried a stunning pair of articles. If you are unable to view them without a subscription, I will summarize their major points here.

The first was entitled, “Beijing Targets Tibet for Assimilation” by Liza Lin, Eva Xaio, and Jonathan Cheng. The assimilation referred to is better described as suppression, and it needs a little historical background.

Twelve centuries had passed between the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism in AD 747 and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gaining control of China in 1949. By 1950, the CCP came into increasing conflict with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama is believed to be a reincarnation of the Buddha. When he dies, his soul is thought to enter the body of a newborn boy, who, after being identified by traditional tests, becomes the new Dalai Lama.

As such, the Dalai Lama is spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and the ex officio ruler of Tibet since the Eighth Century. In 1959, during the Chinese Communist oppression of Tibet, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India where he has remained since. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for leading a nonviolent opposition to continued Chinese claims to rule Tibet.

Xi Jinping, President of China and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has as his national priority the forging of a single Chinese identity centered on unity and Party loyalty. His agenda has placed new restrictions on Tibetan Buddhism and has launched an effort to replace the traditional Tibetan language with Mandarin Chinese while insisting on courses designed for indoctrination in socialism and the CCP.

The Dalai Lama, in exile in India, is now 86 years old. His eventual death is expected to trigger a clash with the Chinese government over control of Tibetan Buddhism. One of the major points of Chinese suppression is a CCP claim that it has the right to identify and choose the Dalai Lama’s “reincarnation,” and thus obtain full control over the heart of Tibetan religion and identity. In late 2020, President Xi Jinping demanded an effort to make Tibetan Buddhism “compatible with a socialist identity.”

This affront to Tibet’s religious freedom actually has a strange sort of precedent. In 2019, Pope Francis signed a concordat — the tenets of which are still secret — in which he agreed to a Chinese Communist Party demand to choose Catholic bishops in the State-approved Chinese Catholic church. This has since translated into increased harassment and suppression of the underground Catholic Church for which many have suffered for their loyalty to Rome.

Pope Francis and the Threat of Schism

A second major article, this one by Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca, appeared on the same day in The Wall Street Journal, again just two days after the announced suppression of the Latin Mass. Its title asks an ominous question: “Is Pope Francis Leading the Church to Schism?” The Pope has used some of the same reasoning and language in restricting the TLM that Xi Jinping uses while suppressing Tibetan Buddhism. Pope Francis cites “unity” as his principal reason and goal, but its effect seems the opposite.

Two years after Cardinal Pell wrote from his prison cell with dismal foreboding about the state of the Church in Germany, Francis X. Rocca quoted Cardinal Rainer Woelki, Archbishop of Cologne and leader of the conservative minority of German bishops. He warned that the current wave of dissent sweeping Germany could lead to schism and/or the formation of a German national church. Rocca reports that similar warnings have been echoed by cardinals and bishops of other European countries.

Recently, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone asked for prayers for the universal Church and the bishops of Germany “that they step back from this radical rupture.” Schism is more a threat to the Catholic Church than any other because, as Rocca points out, its “core identity [of being Catholic] is inextricably tied to its global unity under the pope.”

In my recent post, “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul,” I wrote briefly about the 2014 Synod on the Family and the controversial document penned by Pope Francis, “Amoris Laetitia.” During the Synod, the Catholic Bishops of Africa emerged as a bloc opposed to the liberalizing views on sexuality and divorce proposed by the Germans. In an Easter sermon this year, African Cardinal Philippe Ouedraogo urged African Christians to “rebel against the imperialism of certain lobbies and associations [in the Church] which advocate and want to impose same-sex marriage, socio-sexual debauchery, and divorce.”

Francis X. Rocca writes that Pope Francis has played down these concerns of the African bishops who, in my view, are the future of the Church’s moral integrity. For a glimpse of the mindset at work in the German church, consider this statement by Joachim Frank, a German journalist who is taking part in the synod there. He described the work of the synod:

“There was this sense of movement, of change, another spirit, another type of church after these boring and very painful years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”

In his 26-year papacy, Saint John Paul II is widely considered to have almost single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union and ended European communism. To dismiss his papacy and that of Benedict XVI as “boring and painful” is to break, not with Catholic tradition, but with reality.

The trending Catholic mindset of Germany and most of Europe should not steer the Barge of Peter and the moral authority and praxis of the Church. In Germany, before the 2019-2021 pandemic, only about nine-percent of Catholics attended Mass on a regular basis. Among African Catholics, regular Mass participation is the world’s highest. By 2050, there will be twice as many Catholics in Africa than in Europe.

Throughout Asia, Catholicism is relatively small, but growing, and even though small it has a large footprint. In Thailand, Catholics account for only about one-percent of the population, but they leave a large footprint on the culture because of their orthodox commitment to living their faith, often heroically.

Our friend, Pornchai Moontri, told me that in the five months he has lived in Thailand, he has heard Masses in Thai, Vietnamese, and even Lao, but beyond the visible familiarity of the Mass, he has understood little of what he hears. “If the Church had kept Latin,” he recently said, “this would not happen.” He pointed out rather wisely that in the mobile culture this world has become, a universal language promotes unity instead of detracting from it.

There is one hope still for proponents of the Traditional Latin Mass. It is found in Canon 87 of the Code of Canon Law:

“A diocesan bishop, whenever he judges that it contributes to their spiritual good, is able to dispense the faithful from universal and particular disciplinary laws issued for his territory on his subjects by the Supreme Authority of the Church.”

In other words, approval for continued celebrations of Mass in the Extraordinary Form now falls to individual bishops. However, I remain concerned about one major point raised by Cardinal George Pell citing Catholic Culture’ s Phil Lawler. I mentioned it above, but it must be emphasized:

“I believe Lawler’s diagnosis is correct when he points out that the topic of schism has been raised by the ‘busiest and most aggressive online defenders’ of Pope Francis who ‘’ecognize that they cannot engineer the radical changes they want without precipitating a split in the Church. So they want orthodox Catholics to break away first, leaving [progressives] free to enact their own revolutionary agenda.’”

— Prison Journal Volume Two, p . 214 -215

Conservative and traditional Catholics must not concede to this by schism. You are the Church, and Her most faithful manifestation. It is a quandary why Pope Francis now points to you as “divisive” while remaining silent about the rampant heresies arising out of the progressive German church. I can only conclude with the last two lines of a famous poem by Dylan Thomas written in the year I was born:

"Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

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Please share this post. You may also like this recommended reading by Father Gordon MacRae:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Pope Francis in a Time of Heresy

Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul

Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz

From Hong Kong to America Freedom Is under Siege

Is America ready to surrender free speech and other civil rights? A daring escape from Hong Kong and its encroaching Communist Chinese regime should raise alarms.

Just a few weeks before America shuddered in abhorrence over a post-election mob raid at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, something remarkable unfolded in Hong Kong. Two young Danes — Thomas Rohden, age 25, and Anders Storgaard, age 26 — choreographed a young democracy activist’s escape from Hong Kong. It’s a story worthy of a John le Carré novel. The story was first written in The Wall Street Journal as “A Hong Kong Dissident’s Daring Escape” (Jan. 13, 2021) by Editorial Page writer Jillian Kay Melchior, and it’s fascinating.

The two young Danes, in opposite political parties, belong to a group called the Danish China Critical Society. Its purpose is to raise awareness among Danish citizens about human rights abuses in Communist China. After meeting with some Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in Copenhagen last year, they remained in contact with Mr. Ted Rui, age 38, a Hong Kong legislator who has openly dared to protest legislation that threatens free expression for Hong Kong citizens.

Last summer, China imposed a new law on Hong Kong citizens that outlaws any form of dissent. Mr. Hui’s protests resulted in an arrest for which he was out on bail awaiting prosecution. He had begun to notice that he and some of his family were being followed since the arrest. Other members of the Hong Kong freedom movement have been assaulted. Though Mr. Rui had not yet been charged under China’s new dissent law, he knew that its penalty is life in prison.

A little history: Hong Kong island and the Kowloon Peninsula were ceded by China to become a British dependency in 1841 and 1860 respectively. Over the next 150 years, Hong Kong became a global financial center and one of the world’s largest trading ports.

An agreement signed by the British and Chinese governments in 1984 provided for China to resume sovereignty over Kong Kong and the region in 1997. The agreement was that Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region with its laws guaranteeing its citizens rights for a period of fifty years. The “One State - Two Systems” agreement remained in place until Beijing began to crack down on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in recent years. The massive pro-democracy protests were sparked by a bill introduced in the Hong Kong legislature giving Beijing arrest and extradition authority in Hong Kong.

After Ted Hui was released on bail, Thomas Rohden and Anders Storgaard concocted a bold plan to host a fake climate change conference in Copenhagen and invite Mr. Hui in an effort to get him and his family to safety. Fearing that his telephone might be monitored, they never told him that the planned conference was not real when they invited him. He had already been considering finding a way to go into exile when the invitation came.

Postponing the exile plan, he told the Danes that Hong Kong courts wanted to review the climate change conference before Mr. Hui could accept the invitation to Copenhagen. The Danes put something together in haste while Mr. Hui booked flights for his wife and two children to go to London. Ted Hui arrived in Copenhagen ready to address climate change without ever even suspecting that the conference was a ruse. He was relieved beyond words that he and his family had escaped Chinese communist tyranny.

Beijing and Hong Kong were not amused. Beijing has asserted that its anti-dissent laws also apply to citizens of other countries who conspire to free Chinese residents. Rohden and Storgaard now must avoid travel to or through any country that has an extradition agreement with Beijing. The most important part of this story is Ted Hui’s reaction to his freedom:

“The message I want to take for the Danish people is not to take freedom for granted. Freedom is very fragile. It can go away in months or weeks. The hand of tyranny can extend very quickly, and can influence the world.”

— Ted Hui

The Rise of Socialism

The United States has just witnessed firsthand the need for a warning like Ted Hui’s, formerly of Hong Kong, that “freedom is very fragile.” Exactly as he has warned, “it can go away in months or weeks.” In the month since the mob attack at the U.S. Capitol, forces in this nation have shamed Americans using progressive ideology and the “cancel culture” pandemic to accept without dissent the open suppression of three foundational civil liberties guaranteed in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.

After years of denials by Facebook and Twitter that the platforms suppress conservative points of view, that suppression is now in the open and inflicted without apology. As information technology, these venues have also suppressed freedom of the press. Here is the example that comes most readily to mind: In October, 2020, the New York Post, this nation’s fourth largest daily newspaper, covered on its Front Page a potentially explosive story that has since emerged as both factual and with hard evidence and witnesses that back it up. That story was about the business practices of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, blocked the story from exposure through social media. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did so as well. The rest of the mainstream media, taking their marching orders from Twitter and Facebook, suppressed the story as fraudulent. It was not. The obvious reason for the suppression was the fact that the story emerged a month before an election, but it had little to do with the election. The business practice that was exposed in the story was an allegation that Hunter Biden had received millions in profit from foreign entities through “influence peddling” by selling access to his father during the administration of President Obama.

It was and is an ugly story involving three of the most politically contentious foreign enterprises now faced by President Biden’s administration: China, Russia, and the Ukraine.

My purpose in writing of this is not to denigrate the current president, nor is it to determine truth and falsehood. That is for the Justice Department to do. It turns out that the FBI has been investigating Hunter Biden for many months, and that investigation now includes allegations of multi-million dollar deals within China while his father was vice president. That said, Hunter Biden deserves, and should have, the full spectrum of due process rights afforded to him, but the suppression of news coverage is not one of those rights.

The arrogance of some in the mainstream media being what it is, admissions of culpability are as rare as the unnuanced truth. The story remains suppressed by most of the mainstream news media, but that is changing as the DOJ investigation can no longer be ignored or covered up. Under public pressure, Facebook and Twitter have finally stopped removing the story or suspending the accounts of those sharing it. U.S. foreign policy has been critical of the Chinese Communist government for its suppression of news, but I have been hard pressed to see the difference.

That is the real harm caused by media suppression of this story. Repressive regimes that balk at America’s claim of having a free press all know of it. The mob that attacked Washington all knew of it, and it lent fuel to their insistence that the election was not a free and fair election. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff both knew about it even as they dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.”

The greatest harm has been to President Biden himself. This story will not go away. The fact of its pre-election suppression will cause it to expand and fester. It will haunt his term in office for the next year as he is drawn further into it. Freedom of the press has been abdicated in favor of a deeply partisan bias about the news we should be allowed to see and hear. The institution in our society that should act as a bipartisan government oversight for and by the people has openly betrayed that role. Freedom itself will suffer for it. So will we all.

The Assault on Freedom of Speech

The mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 — purportedly Trump supporters all — inflicted far more damage on Donald Trump and his presidency than any of his political enemies could accomplish. This mob attack at the heart of democracy was not an example of freedom of expression, but it is one of the core rights of our democracy —freedom of speech — that now suffers for it. And, again, so will we all.

Back in 2016, I wrote a pre-election post entitled, “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” That seems almost a reserved and innocent time when compared with the unfathomable chasm between left and right that the four years hence have wrought. I had no frame of reference then for just how relatively fair Mrs. Clinton was being when she relegated a mere half of Trump voters to “a basket of deplorables.” There is now a highly charged and partisan effort to lump all 74 million Trump voters into that basket, keep them there, and silence them.

Blacklists are now emerging among publishers. Simon & Schuster just cancelled a forthcoming book by Senator Josh Hawley entitled, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Remember Mike Lindell? He’s the contagiously happy guy who sells pillows and “Dream Sheets” on TV. Exposed now as a Trump campaign donor, several large U.S. retail outlets have ordered his products pulled from their shelves. I could fill pages with similar examples of political suppression.

It is a credit to Hillary Clinton that she only called half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. The other half, she said with candid honesty, “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them; nobody worries about what happens to their lives and futures ... Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

President Biden should call upon Democrats to end this blood lust for Republicans who cannot in conscience embrace cancel culture, identity politics, and a partisan disregard for the most inherent civil right of all, the right to life. Our newly elected president did not get off to a good start when he called for unity and healing with the insistence that “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” It seems clearly to me right now to be rather the other way around.

Catholics Still in the Basket of Deplorables

There have been some unfortunate — scandalous is a better word — examples of the suppression of free speech even among Catholic leaders since the mob scene of January 6. A reader sent me a very troubling article from America magazine by Father James Martin, SJ entitled, “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol” (Jan. 12, 2021).

The article is little more than a shameful attempt to use the events of January 6 to score political points against the author’s perceived theological and ideological enemies. I found it to be profoundly sad. Father Martin singled out Father James Altman, Father Ed Meeks, Father John Zuhlsdorf, Father Richard Heilman, Father Kevin Cusick, Bishop Richard Stika, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, among others, to be examples of “priests and bishops who count themselves as pro-life (but) helped spawn a hate-filled environment that led to mayhem, violence and, ultimately, death.”

These names, and others like them, are the heroes of traditional Catholics and the Catholic pro-life community. They are deeply respected for speaking openly and with fidelity to Church teaching about the Holocaust of our time, the infanticide of 60 million aborted Americans who have no free speech rights of their own. By denigrating and accusing them so duplicitously, Father Martin scored some ideological points, but only within his own tribe — far left Catholics who would likely be far more comfortable in the U.S. Episcopal church. Frankly, no one else would even be reading America.

In his unfortunate America article, Father James Martin contributes to the atmosphere of tribalism that has so separated Americans in recent years. And clearly, he separates Catholics along the same sad partisan lines.

President Joe Biden’s greatest challenge may not be the conversion of Republicans to more progressive ideologies. It may well be the conversion of the progressive left to the tolerance and unity he rightly calls for. Trump is gone. The Democrats control the House and the White House and have the deciding tie-breaker vote in the Senate. But Portland, Seattle, and other Democrat controlled cities are still rioting, as they did all last summer. CNN blamed it all on Donald Trump then, and is still calling these “peaceful protests.”

Portland, Oregon police reported that the “peaceful protesters came armed with pepper-ball guns, tasers and other electronic crowd control weapons, fireworks, rocks, and shields.” Some were armed with molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray, and crowbars. In Seattle, the January 20 peaceful protesters burned American flags and caused damage to an ICE headquarters. In Portland they carried signs reading, “We don’t want Biden. We want revenge!" They identified themselves as anarchists and antifa protesters responding to racism, fascism, and police brutality.

They also attacked the Democratic headquarters. Police made multiple arrests at the peaceful protests.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like a related post that is mentioned in the text above:

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

And for an example of media duplicity and coverup:

Hitler's Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.

Please share this post!