Ash Wednesday Analysis & Proposal for the U.S. Bishops: "[T]his Provides the Solution for the Grave Crisis which now Scourges Christ’s Catholic Church"
"In this extremely painful situation, we would like to suggest that every bishop who truly desires to follow Christ in His immutable Truth possesses a reservoir of power and grace in this supreme crisis. It lies in the hearts all of those of his faithful who truly seek and hunger to follow Christ, and in their prayers for personal and collective interior purification. And it is each individual bishop who has the power and authority to harness and direct these hearts and these graces."
- James Larson
It is the Catholic Monitor's honor to post Catholic scholar James Larson's analysis and Proposal for the U.S. Bishops. Larson is an American independent scholar who resembles the British independent scholar Christopher Dawson in depth of analysis and learning.
http://rosarytotheinterior.com/
Letter to All U.S. Bishops posted below:
Letter to All The Bishops
On Ash Wednesday, March 6, 2019, we will be sending the following Letter, by way of regular mail, to over 200 bishops in the United States. We ask that you carefully read this analysis and Proposal (including the three links provided), and pray throughout Lent that the vision presented herein will penetrate deeply into the minds and hearts of the hierarchy within this country. We believe strongly that this provides the solution for the grave crisis which now scourges Christ’s Catholic Church.
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Your Excellency,
Re: Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church.
It is the central “vision” of the Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church that the crisis which we now face in the Church is a chastisement from God, and that therefore its solution lies not primarily on focusing our attention and prayers upon the sins of others, but upon each one of us, our adulteries to the world, and our own personal and collective need for interior purification.
We further believe that this invasion of the world into our minds and hearts has reached such a depth and pervasiveness as to be solvable only through Divine intervention, and this especially through Our Lady and Her Rosary. Whether we are confronted with clerical abuse and its cover-up, doctrinal and theological errors, denial of the Church’s moral teaching, the crisis in catechetical teaching, or the abuse of the sacramental life – all of these are rooted in errors which reach to such depths in the spiritual, intellectual, and moral life of contemporary Catholics and their “friendship with this world, which is the enemy of God” ( James 4:4), that no true solutions are to be found except through the extraordinary graces of God which possess the power and light necessary for triumph over the darkness which now envelops and deceives so many. We ask you to read our Original Proposal , which explores the spiritual reasoning behind this effort, and especially the appropriateness of its being centered upon the Feast of the Purification and Presentation (Candlemas) on February 2nd.
This is especially true in regard to that crisis which is now pre-eminent in the minds of millions of Catholic faithful, and in the media: clerical abuse and its cover-up. Any effort to solve this evil which is primarily dependent or centered upon such things as establishing juridical structures and safeguards, or subjection of dioceses and local hierarchy to lay and secular monitoring, is simply a glaring testimony to the nakedness and powerlessness of the contemporary Catholic Church before the modern world. It is therefore also a profound testimony to the radical impotency of our lives in regard to living the graces of the Holy Spirit, always available to those who truly seek to follow Christ, and which should therefore have provided the real discernment, safeguard, and graces against such abuses and decay. For a deeper penetration into precisely what has caused this loss of the power of the Holy Spirit in our own individual lives, and the life of the Church as a whole, we would invite you to read our article on the Third Glorious Mystery: The Descent of the Holy Spirit.
Christ willed a unity of Faith and Charity within His Mystical Body which would be the source of that grace, power, and light which should not only safeguard the Church’s internal purity and integrity, but also be a light to the world in order to effect the conversion of countless souls. This unity and integrity has been so compromised as to now make the Church an object of almost universal scorn, and a victim awaiting the ravages of the Prince of this World – especially in the form of civil powers bent on her subjugation and destruction. In the midst of this division, each of us whether lay, religious, or clerical, are being forced to make a decision.
The absolute imperative of making such a decision became most evident during the recent Vatican Summit on Clerical Abuse. The whole world (so to speak) now knows that those in possession of the highest positions of power in the Church are bent upon denying and obfuscating the most prevailing and obvious external cause of clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up: homosexuality itself, and the Homosexual Network exercising extensive power and control within the Church. What is more, it has become equally evident that maintenance of these positions of power requires the alteration, subtle or not- so-subtle, of Catholic doctrinal and moral truths.
Nowhere was this attack upon the doctrinal and moral foundations of our Faith more evidenced than in the press briefings of Archbishop Charles Scicluna, one of the key organizers of this Summit and one of its key speakers. He has been called “the Vatican’s most respected sex crimes expert”, was selected by Pope Benedict XVI to fully investigate and gather testimony in regards to the Legionaries of Christ and their founder Father Marcial Maciel, and has been the primary investigator in the Chilean clergy sex-abuse scandal, etc. He thus seems to have emerged as the Summit’s primary spokesman. On the first day of the Summit, he made the following extraordinary statement to a reporter’s question as to why the word “homosexuality” was completely absent from the Summit’s opening day:
“You spoke about one category, someone else could speak about heterosexuality. These are human conditions that we recognize, that exist. But they aren’t something that really predisposes to sin.”
The statement that homosexuality does not “predispose” to sin is of course absurd. Even if we consider homosexuality from the perspective as an orientation or temptation which does not come to fruition in the performance of an objectively evil act itself, it is obviously a “predisposition” towards such an act, and therefore evil in itself, just as are the temptations and predispositions to murder, rape, gluttony, slander, etc. Obviously all of these powerful temptations “predispose” towards sin.
But the real deception in Archbishop Scicluna’s statement lies in the attempt to try to establish some sort of common status between heterosexuality and homosexuality by identifying them both as being human “conditions”. Heterosexuality is not a human “condition”, but rather something fully natural and good within human nature. And like all other things that are integral to human nature, there is no evil in heterosexuality itself, but only in any use of it which goes against the order established by God. On the other hand, God does not create people possessing homosexuality as part of their human nature (created in God’s image). Homosexuality is itself a perversion of human sexuality, and any homosexual inclinations or temptations now present to man in his fallen and disordered passions constitute objective evil, even though they may indeed be resisted and therefore not be constituted as individual sin in a particular person. It is therefore not only the homosexual act itself which must be considered objectively evil, but also the orientation or temptation itself.
The denial of these truths of the Catholic faith concerning homosexuality (and also such things as the objective evil of civil divorce and remarriage) reaches ultimately to the denial, not only of the immutability of God and His revealed Truth, but also of the substantial and universal nature of all men created in God’s image.This extraordinarily explicit heresy is also rooted in the denial of being (“I Am Who Am”) as the fundamental principle in all philosophy and theology and its replacement by the concept of evolutionary becoming. Under the reign of this latter principle, all of what constitutes both the human and Divine is deprived of absoluteness, and reduced to temporary and mutable evolutionary “conditions”, which are always subject to evolutionary growth and change. The concept of a substantial, immutable and irrevocable nature, for which man is responsible and accountable, is thereby obliterated; and a false, universal mercy thereby becomes the governing principle of all moral theology. For a penetrating analysis into the nature and history of this heresy, and its penetration into the depths of Catholic thinking, we ask you to read our article on The Third Sorrowful Mystery: The Crowning with Thorns.
A line has therefore been drawn like no other in the history of the Church. What is at stake is the salvation of thousands of souls under your care, and for whom you are responsible before God. Any bishop who chooses to remain with Christ and His Immutable Truth will now clearly place himself in a perilous position. If he chooses to make a public stand (which we deem admirable) against what is clearly the agenda of many who are in positions of higher power and influence, he clearly risks disciplinary actions and even possibly the loss of his office. This of course does not entail the necessity of any sort of schism, but it certainly may entail an at-least dry martyrdom.
In this extremely painful situation, we would like to suggest that every bishop who truly desires to follow Christ in His immutable Truth possesses a reservoir of power and grace in this supreme crisis. It lies in the hearts all of those of his faithful who truly seek and hunger to follow Christ, and in their prayers for personal and collective interior purification. And it is each individual bishop who has the power and authority to harness and direct these hearts and these graces.
We also fully believe, in the light the Gospel and such private revelations as Our Lady of Fatima, that God has entrusted to Mary the power to bring all of this to fruition: “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed”. We therefore implore you to implement what we describe in our Original Proposal for the Feast of the Purification and Presentation, and consider repeating this on other Feasts of the liturgical year which may seem appropriate. We also request that you not only implement this event in your Cathedral Church, but that you ask each of your parish priests to do so in their local churches. We believe that this will bring great blessings not only for you and all the faithful of your diocese, but also for the universal Church.
As stated in the “About” on our website, none of us involved in this effort seek any personal recognition. We simply wish to decrease in order that Our Lord and Our Lady may increase.
Respectfully, In Jesus and Mary,
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