23 August 2017

Amoris laetitia and Auschwitz

According to AL, a conscience may "recognize that a a given situation does not correspond objectively to the demands of the Gospel" but sees "with a certain moral security ... what for now is the most generous response".

Let us examine how this moral principle might apply in situations of organised and industrialised genocide. A man involved in the extermination of Jewry, for example ... if he were to decline to collaborate in any more murders, not only might he be subjected to discriminatory responses, but his family also might suffer grievously. His marriage might suffer! Is he, perhaps, required by the Bergoglian moral principle of "what is for now the most generous response" to try, gradually so as not to be noticed, to reduce the number of Jews whom he kills each day? Or might Bergoglianism mean that he should do his very best to see that they die less painfully? Or should he attempt, again without drawing too much attention to himself, so to work the system that in three months time he gets transferred to duties which involve him less directly in extermination ... like, for example, harmlessly organising the train schedules?

I am aware that my questions lay me wide open to an accusation that I am either an unbalanced crank in making an equivalence between well-mannered habitual adultery among the nice, if rather gleefully rutting, German middle-classes, and genocide; or 'antisemitic' for illustrating a moral priple by talking so calmy about something as vile as what Nazi Germany did to the Jews. It is my view that such an accusation by such an interlocutor would in fact amount to an admission that Adultery is not really sinful ... that it is, well, perhaps not technically in accordance, quite, with the book of rules, but it is not really wrong. Cardinal Coccopalmerio has in fact said something rather like this.

It is also my view that a mortal sin is a mortal sin is a mortal sin is a mortal sin. And Mortal Sin is the area into which, like several fair-sized and unstable bulls in a very tiny china shop, Bergoglio and his cronies have strayed. And by sanctioning what Fr Aidan Nichols has neatly called "tolerated concubinage", I do not think they will bring a single murdered Jew back to life or even save a single victim in future genocides. In fact, quite the contrary. Do we save lives ... or marriages ... by chipping away at the Decalogue, or by shoring it up when it comes under threat?

A person, you tell me, may well know a rule yet be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently. So .... if this does not also apply within genocidal situations, where can it apply?

A person's long involvement, you tell me, in sinful actions may well so habituate him to those actions that the subjective sinfulness, as AL claims, is radically diminished ... yes; I happen to agree with you there, and, like all confessors, I am mindful of this when I sit with my ear against the grill. But you won't forget, will you, that somebody who has been killing Jews for a couple of years might also well be in such a condition. And the tribunals which judged War Criminals after 1945 don't seem to have taken this laudable casuistic principle into their jurisprudence.

Bergoglio's 'jesuitical' campaign to circumvent Veritatis splendor paragraph 80, as well as Familiaris consortio, is both a moral and an ecclesial disaster. If Bergoglian 'moral principles' prevail, then, as Fr Aidan Nichols has accurately put it, "no area of Christian morality can remain unscathed".

14 comments:

Catechist Kev said...

"no area of Christian morality can remain unscathed"

Yep.

How long, do you think, before they start applying the lingual/moral gymnastics to same-se* acts?

Catechist Kev

Ana Milan said...

"no area of Christian morality can remain unscathed". This is the entire point of AL. Not only does PF give the nod to adultery but also to sodomy, & the rest of the Ten Commandments are bound to follow suit. What is termed a 'human right' has become a demonic right & both this pope & prelature are in it up to their necks. No faithful member of the CC is obliged to submit to such arrogant & erroneous teaching of the True Faith. They have put themselves outside it & can rightfully be regarded as Apostates.

Woody said...

This is bound to happen when you start down the wrong road. I've never understood the "morality" of allowing a "married" couple to live together as husband and wife EXCEPT in the bedroom. There, they must agree to live as "brother and sister." As if the situation they are allowed to live in will not lead to an "incestuous relationship." Sort of like telling the alcoholic it's okay to work in the bar, where he makes a very good wage, as long as he doesn't drink any alcohol. But then again why not? How many bishops let homosexual men join the seminary because those men promised they wouldn't partake in their sexual desires with other men anymore. There are no more rules. There are only exceptions to the rules. And that is the way it should be because we are only human and God created us that way. You need to get a bigger boat, Martin Luther. Lots of catholics are climbing on board and they're wearing miters.

prince Matecki said...

Father, as far as I know my Enchiridion Symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum and its german version "Der Glaube der Kirche in den Urkunden der Lehrverkündigung", it has been defined as a heresy and has been condemned to state that man - with due exercise of his intellect - can not in a given situation recognize what is good and allowed and discern it from what is evil and forbidden. And therefore can choose the right and avoid the evil. As far as I know it has also been condemned as a lutheran heresy to state that man might be tempted into situations where there is no good and rightous solution but only the choice between two evils. Therefore I would content that our good frater from ordo praedicatorum had some reason for his speech about the pitfalls of AL.

Donna Bethell said...

Bravo, dear Father. The Four Cardinals saw this implication clearly. Four of the five dubia are about, not whether an adulterer may receive Holy Communion, but very general and fundamental moral principles. They are asking whether, after AL, morality has any meaning at all.

Unknown said...

Thanks, Father. My own thoughts concerning AL have been going in somewhat the same direction. The pastoral discernment the Pope, Archbishop Fernandez and the other minions want to encourage has to do with with who can engage in sexual relations, what kind of sexual relations, under what circumstances etc. If I were to go to Pope Francis and tell him that I was a business man and I had no other choice for the moment than to employ people who had been trafficked, pay them a substandard wage and maintain them in substandard living conditions, I am almost sure that moral absolutes would click in and discernment would be out of the question. After all Pope Francis is the man who said that an American presidential candidate could not be a Christian because he wanted to build a wall on one border. S much for discernment.
Pope Francis seems to want the bishops to focus their teaching on a broad range of moral issues and especially not to concentrate too much on pro-life issues or anything having to do with marriage and sexuality. But then that is the emphasis of so much of what he and the minions are emphasizing in their talk of discernment.

neilmac said...

discernment
noun
taking one's time, in a deceitful and self-righteous manner, to oppose, ignore, or evade Catholic teaching.

Peter said...

Indeed Father nurses and midwives in the UK are not free to refuse to assist indirectly with abortion. Are they thus like the man filling the trains? Which bishops resist this unjust law?

Tom B. said...

What this school of thought is doing in the field of sexual ethics, they are also replicating analogously in the area of Ecumenism Gone Wild: devaluing the true Church as just one among the many entities "journeying together," while extolling our "real if partial communion" with heretics and schismatics just like how they extol the "real if imperfect love" in adulterous, fornicating, homosexual, and other kinds of "irregular" relationships, and drawing similarly erroneous conclusions for both sexuality and ecclesiology. Sad!

Michael Dowd said...

When conscience is our god there is no other.

Anonymous said...

Your frantically rutting Huns are the real cause here, I suspect. Ludicrously funded and over-funded church which is throwing its Teutonic weight around, again, buying popes. Unfortunately, I do believe our Heiliger Vater may be a stool pigeon. To quote Mr T, I pity the fool.

Grupo editorial said...

Mr. Stork, could you please give the reference for the declaration of those two ideas as heresy? These days, it would be a really useful thing to have at one's fingertips.

Bruno

Reader said...

Parallel argument at http://aemaet.de/index.php/aemaet/article/viewFile/44/pdf_1
by Josef Seifert.

mtcbones said...

it would seem to me that if a man could see no other way of earning a living and he had a great talent for finding out when one was away from home he could discern what wordly goods were in my home or even santa marta and look through these goods to find what would help him to prosper. if he had spent a reasonable time at this discerning could he not take and use those good things to live on.