Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
I have noted several times on this blog what not a few others have noted elsewhere: that a coincidence of spiritual and temporal (aka penal) authorities in one institution is the bane of humanity.
Already at the start of their second millennium, the Papacy conjured that bane by claiming exactly that coincidence of authority in the persons and offices of their senior leadership.
This claim incited conflict with temporal authorities: first with the Holy Roman Emperor (Germany, northern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia), then with the Reformers, then with the King of England, then with the Parisian Mob, and now with China.
Said conflict distilled into hot and cold war between families/movements referred to by historians as Guelphs and Ghibellines. It persists today, though under different names.
Guelphs support/ed a coincidence of spiritual and temporal (aka penal) authority in the Papacy. Ghibellines support/ed temporal authority in the hands of secular rulers and, later, governments.
Roughly speaking, Guelphs were/are less-educated personalities with moderate to decent amounts of common sense but prone to manipulation by cynics (aka democrats). Roughly speaking, Ghibellines were/are more-educated personalities — or at least more-credentialed and-socialized– with moderate to decent knowledge of human affairs but prone to Siren Songs of ambition (aka envy).
Originally, Guelphs and Ghibellines were families (Houses) whose intra-family loyalties tended, over centuries, to favor conjoining temporal authority with religious authority to be delivered through one institution, the Papacy, or, to favor recognizing that those authorities’ uniquenesses require that they be delivered through two institutions, one for each authority.
In The Latin Church, the institutionalized embodiment of spiritual authority was never in dispute. Well, not until the Reformers appeared, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Henry VIII of England.
Jesus the Christ, of Nazareth and God, and St. Paul the Apostle, of Tarsus and Rome, are on record recognizing (1) uniqueness as between spiritual and temporal (aka penal) authorities and therefore (2) differentiation of their operational areas and institutional embodiments.
Church leadership has spiritual authority. Secular leadership, of whatever kind, has temporal authority. Until Henry VIII of England, the singular authority of Popes to consecrate Bishops and Bishops to ordain Priests was challenged by rulers and governments but not with permanent success.
An Aside:
Note that Pope Francis I has upended traditional papal posture on investiture of Bishops by accepting ChiComs’ assertion of authority to appoint Roman Catholic Bishops in China. Pace Hildebrand of Sovana! ChiComs, in other words, assert that temporal authority is also spiritual authority. This is the obverse of the papacy’s traditional assertion that spiritual authority is also temporal authority. And Francis I concurs with ChiComs in this particular.
The effect is the same: Hell for people. A spiritual lapse now meets with civil procedure and punishment. The Confessional is a Re-Education Camp if you are lucky and a Concentration Camp more likely.
Two thousand years in and Pope Francis I caves to a temporal authority. In effect, he says — truthfully — he has no temporal authority. Not only that, he admits, by implication, that the church cannot gain temporal authority where it does not own consequential geography.
There remains a typically devious Jesuit gaming of force vectors, for which see below. However, the point has been made and cannot be unmade: the church is not a temporal authority.
Francis I is not a man who can make the church a spiritual authority. Too much Jesuit conceit and deceit in his stochastic structure (aka intellectual DNA). But he has performed the welcome service of exposing the church — and permanently — as a paper tiger with respect to temporal authority.
In other words, conflict erupted over the institutional embodiment of temporal authority, not over the institutional embodiment of spiritual authority.
The deep reason for this? Simple. Church offices came with ownership of land and more or less of families working on it to produce food and income for the landowner and themselves. The higher the office, the more the land attached to it. Over time, lands gifted or otherwise accreting to stacks of deeds owned by Prelates and Abbots grew huge in size. Moreover, most often those lands, being ecclesial domain, were not taxed by secular authorities. In consequence, the lands became wealth and power — which are fungible — to their owners and to the Popes to whom those Prelates and Abbots owed their positions. Prelates and Abbots, controlling ever-increasing tracts of usually the most fertile lands, could and did nudge affairs of state as if they possessed temporal authority parallel and sometimes in opposition to secular rulers and governments.
Unsurprisingly, secular rulers and governments deduced multiple reasons to seek control of Prelates and Abbots by controlling their investiture.
Thus did temporal authorities (rulers, governments) seek to appoint Prelates and Abbots friendly and financially generous to them. Popes wished to make those appointments for the same reason . . . and also to prove and enforce, seemingly at least, a profound spiritual truth: that, ultimately, God is the only authority for anything whatsoever, and that spiritual authority, no matter its mundane institutional base or moral condition, is responsible for reminding humanity of that fact.
Normal people take God as their religion and government as a threat.
Abnormal people take government as their religion and God as a threat.
The rub came when church leadership wanted to exercise civil penal authority or raise and command armies, or, when secular leadership wanted to appoint, within their domains, Prelates to Sees and Abbots to Monasteries.
Which is a mild way of saying that the rub came when Popes claimed the singular and plenary authority of God in all affairs whatsoever and certain theologians, under protection of geography and civil authorities, undertook to evacuate that claim by exegeting the Bible, the Ecumenical Creeds, Patristic Theology, and the phenomenology of Reason. And still the Papacy, impelled by Jesuits and self-interest, came on, precipitating, finally, Europe’s most sanguine conflict, between 1618 and 1648.
Now, it so happens that Popes’ and Prelates’ having temporal authority as well as spiritual authority is more noxious to the human condition than rulers’ and governments’ having authority to appoint (invest) Prelates and Abbots. More misery descends from the activities of religious police than does from the activities of secular police. This is a fact of life.
Jesuits, the Companions of Jesus, having in novitiate undergone much of the suffering He did — making Jesuits ecclesial counterparts of Special Operations Forces Soldiers — commenced life as Guelphs. They remain so postured. They adopted Aquinas’ sense-based epistemology and its necessary predilection for Nominalism because that enables them to have it both ways during disputation. Repeatedly over centuries, Jesuits sought to consolidate spiritual and temporal authority in the Papacy . . . and themselves to control the Papacy. Urbi et Orbi.
The goal of Jesuits and Guelphs generally differs not from that of Salafists. The names changes, but neither the intent nor its nominal defense change one jot: world domination through a coincidence of temporal authority and spiritual authority in one institution, the nominally spiritual one.
Globalists are a modern iteration of Guelphs and Salafists in the obverse. Their intellectual and moral ancestors are Henry VIII of England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Switzerland and France. Instead of a singular authority, religious as temporal (aka penal), attaching to the Papacy or Ulema, Globalists envision a singlar authority, temporal as religious, attaching to an oligarchy comprising themselves and a singular bureaucracy, a panel of experts they assemble, without scrutiny of course, to execute their determinations.
Popes said the church they head is the singular religious/temporal authority. Globalists say the government they head — or dream of doing — is the singular temporal/religious authority. One says the church is the government. The other says the government is the church. The effect is the same: misery for the generality and concupiscence for the [soi-dissant] elites.
Your attachment to God tells the degree of your normalcy.
Your attachment to government tells the degree of your abnormalcy.
The French Revolution and World Wars I and II convinced Jesuits that rulers and governments will not consign their temporal/penal authority to the Papacy and themselves. They observed successes Communists had overthrowing and subverting secular institutions and governments, which really was what Jesuits had in mind as well. So when their Anti-Communist Superior-General Wlodimir Ledóchowski passed away in 1942, Jesuits threw up the helm and drove before a full flight of Leftist Wind, as they have done ever since.
Their reasoning — for Jesuits are reasoners, like Aquinas of the Summa — is simple. If we cannot capture singular authority in an institution we control, let us join forces with Leftists, Salafists, and Globalists who are doing that with apparent success and convince them to use us as key leaders of the movement. This way we co-opt their efforts to our own agendas. And let us convince as many as possible in church and religious hierarchies to join us in this adventure.
If Jesuits and like-minded churchmen are key leaders of a successful Leftist/Salafist/Globalist drive to fold spiritual and temporal authorities into one plenary political power, then, the logic goes, the Papacy, Prelacy, and Jesuits have finally accomplished the goal of collecting all authority whatsoever into themselves. This logic and its mundane execution are the very definition of concupiscence.
But then there is this: The Catholic abuse scandal now leads all the to way the Vatican.
And this: Catholic Cold War Turns Hot.
And this: The Crisis In The Catholic Church.
And this: Pope Francis’ Accuser Turns Up the Pressure With More Accusations.
Debra Heine: Vigano to Journalists: Investigate Vatican’s ‘Cache of Documents’ Showing Clerical Sexual Abuse
And this from John Hinderaker: The Scandal of Left-Wing Journalists Covering A Left-Wing Pope
And this: The John Jay Report
Related at Wikipedia, who steers the light away from sodomy per se among priests, prelates, and parishioners.
And then Bishop Robert Morlino, Madison, WI:
Bishop’s blistering letter: Time to root out ‘homosexual subculture’ in Church hierarchy
Retreats for ‘gay priests, brothers’ and ‘lesbian sisters’ to take place in Milwaukee archdiocese
Rocked by scandals, the Vatican should cancel the pro-LGBT World Meeting of Families
A residence of spiritual and temporal authority in one institution with penal power, whether church or government, is the bane of humanity. It is the Holy Grail of the Leftist/Jihadist/Globalist dream. It is their vision, the hope of misanthropic, misogynistic monsters. Tom Wolfe remarks the dream’s recent American aetiology in his justly celebrated essay, The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening.
What to do?
Discharge your duties. Observe developments. Think for yourself. Discover what personalities of historical grandeur did in like circumstances. Speak the truth.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: Leading Catholic magazine retracts endorsement of Judge Kavanaugh
Update 2: Jacob Nordangard: The Elite Technocrats Behind The Global ‘Great Reset’
Update 3: Billionaire Atheist Funnels Cash Too Jesuits
Update 4: Archbishop Vigano: Open Letter To POTUS 25 October 2020, Solemnity of Christ The King
Maike Hickson: Archbishop Viganò discusses the Great Reset, gives hope in light of Our Lady of Fatima
Robert Moynihan: The Vigano Tapes
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA