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MEMO

To: His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

From: Laura Jones - http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com

Date: September 18, 2008

Subject: Truth decided by majority vote?!?!?!?!

Your Holiness: In my previous memo I laid out how egregiously the USCCB, led by Card. Rigali and Bp. Lori, insists upon offending against what you have laid out, in forceful language, and even as the keynote theme of your papacy: your belief that faith and reason can, and must, live side by side, within the individual and in society at large.

Today I wish to bring to your attention how blatantly and unabashedly this same cabal goes against a key principle which I remember being stressed by you in your days as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Truth is not to be decided by majority vote.

14 Bishops Have Corrected Senator Biden's Error

By Tim Waggoner

9/16/2008

Catholic Online

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) - Catholic bishops across the nation have rebuked Senator Joe Biden.

Here is American Papist's updated list of bishops who have responded to Sen. Joe Biden (in somewhat chronological order):

1. Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton

2. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, CO

3. Bishop James Conley, his auxiliary

4. Bishop Robeert Morlino of Madison

5. Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC

6. Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa, OK

7. Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, PA

8. Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, CT

9. Bishop Fran Malooly of Wilmington, DL

10. Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo, ND

11. Bishop Gregory Aymond of Austin, TX

12. Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, IA

13. Bishop Paul Coakley of Salina, KS

14. Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston, MA

You will note, Your Holiness, that, thanks be to God, no one in my chat group is among these bishops attempting to get enough votes to support their claims in opposition to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas – and of the Catholic Church by and large, in a matter which has never been definitively decided, either by a plausible reasoned hypothesis, or by any credible decree of the Catholic Church, namely, the precise moment at which the developing person attains the sophistication to qualify as what – in the comparable process of the evolution of the entire species – we would designate as a fully formed and ensouled “person”.

I just came across a Vatican item backing up the USCCB by the Knights of Columbus or some such, Card. Foley, I guess. Their complaint against Biden was that he relied on St. Thomas’ 13th century biology!!! I mean, as if biology were the science we would use to determine when the body is “ensouled” – when some of the most “modern” up-to-date biologists are even now, this very day, arguing that there is no such thing as a soul to begin with!!! But, keep reading, your Holiness, because I have even more absurd such discrepancies to point out to you – and these in the official instrumentum laborium of the upcoming Synod itself, on the Word of God.

Amid this morass of imbecilities I was gratified and relieved to find, in my recent surfing, the following excerpt from an address you gave not long ago:

Christianity is not a philosophy but a personal encounter with Jesus

Vatican City (AsiaNews) – Christianity [quoting your Holiness] "is not a philosophy or a moral norm; we are Christians only if we encounter Jesus". As for Paul on the road to Damascus, this encounter changes both our way of thinking and our life itself, clearing away what was essential up until that moment, while it is "only life in Christ that matters".

Yet, have you, your Holiness, actually seen the “instrumentum laboris”, the working paper, drawn up to provide guidelines for the forthcoming 12th general assembly of the Synod of Bishops due to meet October 5-26!?!?!

After an unnecessarily tedious introductory account of salvation history, we read:

“Like us in everything except sin (cf. Heb 2:17; 4:15), the Word of God had to express himself in a human way, through words and deeds, which are recorded in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels. The language employed is human in every way, except for error.”

I mean, how can you expect a body of would-be scholars to make sense of anything at all when they do not even understand that “error” does not reside not in language!!! The Synod Fathers would do well to consult the 13th century Angelic Doctor, who did not need the materially explorative techniques of modern biology to understand that our minds, with their discursive reasoning powers, are unable to adequately express the simplicity of spiritual realities which we are able to know, but darkly. Neither with perfect clarity, nor exhaustively are we able to express such higher, and more simple, realities. I will have more to say on this score as we move through the instrumentum:

“With the eyes of faith, the believer discovers the splendour of divine glory in the fragility of the human nature of Jesus Christ, ‘as the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth’ (Jn 1:14). In a similar way, every Christian is invited through the words of Sacred Scripture to discover the Word of God, the splendour of the glorious Gospel of Christ, who is the likeness of God (cf. 2 Cor 4:4). This takes place through a demanding, patient and ongoing process, involving historical-critical study (even diachronic), the application of every scientific and literary method available (intended for a synchronic understanding) and research from the vantage point of literature. Illuminated by the Holy Spirit, the gift of the Risen Christ, and guided by the Magisterium, the faithful attentively read the Scriptures and draw out their full meaning in encountering the Word of God, the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who has the words of eternal life (cf. Jn 6:68).”

There follows a very long quote, so rather than ask you to plough through all the absurdity in one gulp, I am pasting in the rest of the material quoted from the instrumentum following the close of this memo.

Because what I wish to stress is that during the tribulations which beset religious faith all over the world in the course of the last century, most especially, it was not by any such scholastic enterprise, which in Eastern Orthodoxy was never in fact pursued except in areas invaded by Catholicism, Ukraine is a superb instance, that this faith and such a personal relationship with God conserved and fostered. Such efforts where they did exist were eliminated as any such places of learning were eliminated, books were confiscated, libraries burned, such as engaged in such study were imprisoned, and in conditions where they barely survived from one day to the next, many died, and this daily – needless to say, the survivors were not about to pursue a demanding, patient and ongoing process, involving historical-critical study (even diachronic [whatever that means!]), the application of every scientific and literary method available (or synchronic [or how this is to be distinguished from it!!!] understanding) and research from the vantage point of literature. End quote.

Absolutely definitively, your Holiness, it was NOT as guided by the Magisterium, that those faithful in the vast GuLag attentively read the Scriptures and drew out their full meaning in encountering the Word of God, the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ!!! You can ask my Spiritual Father, Abp. Paul of Ryazan, who grew up in just such a prison city, KarLag, as it was known, under the spiritual guidance of the Optina Elder, St. Sebastian of Karaganda. I wish you could have him testify, your Holiness, to these would-be “intellectuals”, with all their fancy schmancy so-called scholarship, expressed in hi-falutin’ words that not one half of one percent of the population, even were it a university graduate community, would know – and which would prove meaningless anyhow, who cares if it’s at a different time or the same time? God has nothing to do with chronological time anyhow, just for starters.

No, your Holiness, yet it was in the prison camps, and through personal encounters with one another in the Lord that the faith was not only preserved, but was chastened, purified, enlivened to such a degree that more martyrs were raised up in such settings than at any time since the early pagan persecutions. No catechesis, no “theological” tomes were in evidence here. Do you not think it significant that while Europe emerged from the 20th century radically secularized – you and France’s Pres. Sarkozy focused your attention on this in your recent visit to France – during the very same timeframe, in Russia and the eastern, predominantly Orthodox, lands, the Faith was invigorated. In fact, the atheistic Soviet regime that held this entire part of the world in thrall for 70 years found it utterly impossible to suppress the Faith, so much was it a part of the people’s fundamental mentality, their language, even – in Russian, “thank you” is God save you, Sunday is “resurrection”, the seasonal changes are referred to by the feast days that mark them, etc. Even more significant, when all the books were confiscated, the Slavic people had their ikons – “scripture writ in color”.

Catholics are getting around to grudging admission that ikons have their place, but they still have no understanding of their theological depth – which, in fact, exceeds by far what we are able to express through – well, such wordiness as the instrumentum exhibits, just for starters. This aspect of the typical Roman Catholic mindset was evident in the doctoral thesis which Pope John Paul II wrote at the Angelicum on “The Object of Faith in St. John of the Cross”. As over a hundred pages filled mostly with quoted passages from St. John of the Cross testified most forcefully, the “object” of faith, in the scholastic sense, is God Himself. In the words of a spiritual classic written about the time of St. John of the Cross, this knowing is referred to as the “Cloud of Unknowing.” As St. Paul says, “faith is the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). This is because of the extent to which God exceeds the powers of the human intellect – much as we are blinded if we look at the sun, not because of darkness, but because of the excess of light exceeding our power of vision.

It is my personal belief that the young priest destined to become pope had some difficulty reconciling this with the emphasis the Catholic tradition places on Vatican pronunciamentos, which, even when they are not presented as “infallible” dicta tend, nevertheless, to be heeded by many far beyond the word of God in Sacred Scripture – which, indeed, tends, and most especially in the post-scholastic tradition, to be vastly more argued over than believed, which, in turn, poses obstacles to its being lived! If people are still arguing over what they should believe, they clearly are little able to put anything at all into action, as we see in the absurd and malicious squabbling over when the unborn has all that is required to be a human person, something that cannot at the present time be known, either by reason or by faith – nor is it relative to the political arena targeted by the aforementioned USCCB bishops. We must respect life, not as a “right”, for we do not have any such “right”; our very being is a pure, unmerited, gift from God. Hence it is precious as being such a divine gift, and it is not by all this hateful and totally mindless screaming the bishops are resorting to that we respect God’s gift, but by that love for God and for one another in God which was displayed in the extreme conditions of the Godless prison camps – under the atheistic Soviet regime, and also elsewhere, in Europe, for instance, St. Edith Stein, and St. Maximilian Kolbe, both gave their own lives to save Jewish lives, as also did St. Maria Skobtsova, and many others. It is through listening to such as these that we will come to a personal relationship with Christ – not through all those diachronic, synchronic, etc., so-called “studies”.

I would like to rest my case at this point, but – well, maybe I feel I am becoming too angry with the bishops, when they are really the victims of a distorted tradition, as we see by the confusion of young Fr. Karl Wojtyla, inasmuch as St. John of the Cross never addresses the question of dogmatic definitions being in any sense an “object of faith” – which, of course, is how “defined dogma” is treated within the Catholic Church. Moreover, the future Pope defended his thesis before a board of 9, as I recall, most of whom later became cardinals, and THE mystical theologian of the time, Dominican Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, was his mentor. So how this mentality of the American bishops who feel they are fully in the right in refusing Eucharistic Communion to anyone – Dr. Douglas Kmiec, Sen’s Kerry, Biden, or whoever else – who disagrees with a really quite arbitrary position they, as bishops, defend, even to the sacrifice of right reason, ever got going, I frankly do not know, but, then, I am a theologian and scholar of Holy Scripture; I am not either a psychologist or an historian. As a doctoral student, Pope John Paul evidently felt he had sufficiently addressed the confusion by adding to his thesis a very extensive appendix of quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas, all of which state that doctrinal propositions are not themselves the object of Faith, which is God. And the Angelic Doctor explains that these complex propositions are, rather, the way we, by reason of our discursive intellect, are constrained to EXPRESS or knowledge of God, Who is perfectly one and simple, indeed, He IS simplicity itself.

And so, your Holiness, I want to say something about how such non-discursive knowledge is to be gleaned in some measure, from an ikon, which one simply contemplates with rapture – Rublev’s Trinity is a superb example of this, one who contemplates it with Faith actually has the experience of somehow entering into the Trinitarian Communion as an integral part of it. In some mystical manner the ikon serves to unite the viewer, not with itself, but with the mystery it represents – and this without all the discursive babble that characterizes catechesis and all the rest. I have a discussion of the Trinitarian theology of Rublev’s Trinity on my web site, www.mamaleh-larisa.com, in my “Manifesto” which can be accessed under that heading, or by clicking on the ikon of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I mention this, because you will see that, besides the postures of the 3 figures, the colors of their garments indicate quite clearly Who is the Father, pointing with his hand extending 2 fingers, symbolizing the two natures of Christ Incarnate, the other 3 fingers folded to symbolize the Trinity, thus expressing the entire Mystery we find prefacing John’s Gospel and encapsulating its theology, “In the beginning …”

Yet all the write-ups I found on this ikon maintained that we have no idea which Person is Which!!! I mean, if it’s just 3 divine guys – what happens to the mystery of the Trinity, expressed to us in time through the Incarnation??? Moreover, in the chapel of the Dominican Ecole biblique in Jerusalem when I was there, they had the ikon done in white and gold, as I recall – in any case, they had no sense whatsoever of the theological relevance of the colors.

Moreover, it is not from theological tomes, but rather from our theological hymnology, being the meditations of the saints throughout 2 millennia of sacred history, upon the Gospel, that we learn theology – and this is also true, incidentally, of the chant used in the Catholic Church, Gregorian and others, including also that of Anglican chant. Persecutions have never been able to suppress this hymnology, which also has a way of taking possession of our psyche. We see how our Lord Himself made use of the Psalmody known from its daily use to the Jewish people, as he cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Within the inmost selves of the faithful Jews who heard him, would resonate the rest of Psalm 22, concluding, “Yea, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down, … and he who cannot keep himself alive. Men shall proclaim His deliverance to a people yet unborn, that He has wrought it.”

I honestly hope and pray, your Holiness, that you will let Archbishop Paul and me come to Rome and explain to the members of the Synod the truths of the Christian Faith which are being so distorted beyond recognition and beyond all reason by the Bishops and Synodal Fathers who by all rights – and most certainly in God’s providence, should be communicating to the people the truths I state here, not their malevolent caricatures of God’s word proclaimed to us by God the Word.

[Continuing with:] The topic of the XII Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church can be understood in its christological sense, namely, Jesus Christ in the Life and Mission of the Church. This christological approach, linked by necessity to the pnuematological one, leads to the discovery of the Trinitarian dimension of revelation. Looking at the subject in this way ensures the unity of revelation. All the words and deeds, recorded in Sacred Scripture by the inspired authors and faithfully guarded in Tradition, come together in the Person of the Lord Jesus, the Word of God. This is seen in the New Testament, which narrates and proclaims the mystery of his death, resurrection and presence in the midst of the Church, the community of his disciples called to celebrate these sacred mysteries. Because of the grace which leads to the destruction of sin (cf. Rm 6:6), his followers seek to conform themselves to their Master so that each might live Christ (cf. Gal 2:20). Such is also the case in the Old Testament which, according to Jesus’ own words, refers to himself (cf. Jn 5:39; Lk 24:27). Reading the Scriptures from a christological and pneumatological perspective leads from the letter to the spirit and from the words to the Word of God. Indeed, the words often conceal their true meaning, especially when considered from the literary and cultural point of view of the inspired authors and their way of understanding the world and its laws. Doing so leads to rediscovering the unity the Word of God in the many words of Scripture. After this necessary and ardent process, the Word of God shines with a surprising splendour, more than making up for the labour expended.

This Instrumentum Laboris, presenting the agenda for the upcoming synodal assembly, employs this dual, complementary approach to the Word of God and represents the contents of the responses to the questions in the Lineamenta, coming from the synods of the Eastern Churches sui iuris, the episcopal conferences, the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, the Union of Superiors General and others who wanted to offer their observations on such an important subject.

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