OVERVIEW OF "TROUBLE WITH CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT" & TEXT OF ESSAY: "According to Fortin, Tierney...[& Maritain are] wrong because you cannot separate a 'vocabulary of rights' from its 'anti-teleological philosophy'. An ethic of virtue assumes humans are designed by God for a specific purpose (holiness, communal harmony). An ethic of rights assumes individuals have no fixed natural end and must therefore be given maximum autonomy to define their own purpose"
Google AI overview:
Jacques Maritain and Brian Tierney both trace human rights to Christian and medieval roots, but Maritain approaches them through 20th-century Thomist personalism while Tierney uncovers their origins in 12th-century canon law. [1, 2]
Fr. Ernest Fortin’s famous 1988 article, "The Trouble with Catholic Social Thought". In that text, Fortin targets the modern Church—specifically modern bishops—for eagerly adopting the language of liberal individual rights to address economic and social issues. [1]
By analyzing the broader paragraph where this quote appears, you can see exactly how Fortin uses this distinction to attack Tierney’s historical continuity thesis:
The Missing Teleology (The "Why" of Human Life)
Immediately following that sentence, Fortin argues that the true originators of the rights doctrine are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He states that rights talk emerged as a radical departure from premodern Christian thought because its underlying premise completely rejects the idea of human perfection: [1]
"Its underlying premise is that, contrary to what had been previously assumed, human beings are not intrinsically ordered to a natural end, in the attainment of which they find their happiness or perfection." [1]
According to Fortin, Tierney is wrong because you cannot separate a "vocabulary of rights" from its "anti-teleological philosophy". An ethic of virtue assumes humans are designed by God for a specific purpose (holiness, communal harmony). An ethic of rights assumes individuals have no fixed natural end and must therefore be given maximum autonomy to define their own purpose. [1, 2]
The Political Weaponization of Rights
Fortin notes that the Church was historically "hesitant to adopt an idiom that had been so prominently abused by bitterly anti-Catholic and... very confused thinkers" like Hobbes and Locke. [1]
He points out that the language of rights was explicitly forged by early modern liberals to dismantle the moral authority of the Church. Therefore, when Tierney claims that modern human rights are a beautiful, organic flower growing out of medieval canon law, Fortin thinks he is blind to a hostile takeover. For Fortin, trying to fix modern social decay by using "rights talk" is like trying to cure a disease with the very pathogen that caused it.
THE TROUBLE WITH CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT In speaking out on urgent matters, like the economy and nuclear warfare, the bishops may be neglecting their most important task BY ERNEST L. FORTIN Toward the close of Vatican II, a distinguished Protestant theologian, himself an observer at the council, remarked that, in its endeavor to come to terms with the modern world, the Roman Catholic Church was trying to com- plete in less than five years what Protes- tantism had failed to accomplish in well over a century. The statement was intended as a friendly warning that the domain into which the council fathers had ventured was strewn with pitfalls that the euphoria generated by their deliberations could easily cause them to ignore. The truth of that statement has been amply borne out by more recent devel- opments, not the least notable of which is the church's unprecedented involvement in prob- lems of a directly political nature. Typically, in the twenty-odd years that separate us from the end of the council, the bishops have published more documents dealing with social issues than they did throughout the first 200 years of their existence as an in- dependent hierarchy. No one denies that many of these docu- ments, and above all the widely publicized pastorals on nuclear warfare and the American economy, represent a substantial contribution to the national debate, which the bishops are eager to elevate by injecting a strong moral note. What is less obvious or less often said is that the same documents bring into sharper focus a number of ten- sions inherent in the church's current posi- tion on social matters. My aim is not to de- fend or criticize that position but to indicate wherein, as I see it, the tensions lie and in what sense the chord sounded in the pas- torals and related texts differs from the one to which Catholics were formerlv accus- tomed. With all due respect to the authority of the bishops, I shall argue that their latest teaching is implicitly grounded in a bifur- cated anthropology; that it simultaneously pursues two sets of goals that are not easily reconcilable with each other; that it combines traditional Christian doctrine with ideas that once were and may still be fundamentally antithetical to it; in short, that it suffers from a latent bifocalism that puts it at odds with itself and thereby weakens it to a con- siderable extent. Anyone who reads the new documents against the background of the older ones can- not help being struck by the overwhelming emphasis that they place on the notion of human rights, the hallmark of modern Ernest L. Fortin, AA, is a professor of theology at Boston College. A version of this essay first appeared in "Free Inquiry." BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE 37 ethical theory. What once presented itself as first and foremost a doctrine of duties and hence of virtue or dedication to the common good of one's society now takes its bearings, not from what human beings owe to their fellow human beings, but from what they can claim for themselves. This observation is only apparently belied by the fact that Chapter 2, Section B, of the letter on the economy opens with an "outline of the duties all people have to each other and to the whole community"; the rest of the text makes it clear that these duties are rooted in pre-existing rights which everyone is obliged in conscience to honor and which must, therefore, be regarded as the primary moral phenomenon. unlike the bishops, the Bible never goes so far as to propose that something might be owed to the poor, the afflicted, and the underprivileged simply by reason of their poverty. At first glance, the difference between the two views might be looked upon as one of approach rather than of genuine substance, and the more so as rights and duties are to some extent correlative. If I have a duty to do something, I must also have the right to do it, although the converse need not be true. Moreover, there is no reason to think that the use of different approaches to the same problem leads of necessity to substan- tially different results. Climb to the top of Mt. Everest from the north or from the south, and you arrive at the same destina- tion, even if one side turns out to be easier or otherwise more suitable than the other. Differences of this kind are not uncommon in the Christian tradition and are in part responsible for the vitality that it has demonstrated across the centuries. The early church fathers were attracted to Plato and found him better adapted to their purpose, which was to implant Christianity in a world that was as yet unfamiliar with it. For reasons of their own, the medievals preferred Aristotle, whose philosophy is eminently suited to a situation in which Christianity was already fully accredited. No one would describe the two groups as being at log- gerheads with each other. Such is not always, the case, however. If one's method of procedure has been delib- erately chosen with a view to a different end, rather than as a different means to the same end, its employment is bound to have an im- pact on what is accomplished. It is significant that the notion of universal human rights, understood as rights that inhere in each human being by reason of the fact that he or she is a human being, does not occur anywhere in premodern thought and, until very recent times, only sparingly in Roman Catholic thought. The Bible itself, which shares to some degree the perspective of classical philosophy on this point, does not promulgate a Bill of Rights, of which it knows nothing; instead, it issues a set of commandments. For centuries, the corner- stone of Catholic moral theology was not the natural or human rights doctrine but something quite different, called the natural law. Rights, to the extent that they were mentioned at least by implication, were con- tingent on the fulfillment of prior duties. Far from being absolute or inalienable, they could be forfeited and were so forfeited by the individual who failed to abide by the law that guaranteed them. Simply stated, what the church taught and tried to inculcate was an ethic of virtue as distinct from an ethic of rights. To the best of my knowledge, the true originator of the rights doctrine is Hobbes, from whom it was taken over by virtually all of the great early modern thinkers, Spinoza, Locke, and Rousseau foremost among them. That doctrine emerged by way of a reaction against premodern thought and signals a radical departure from it. Its underlying premise is that, contrary to what had been previously assumed, human beings are not intrinsically ordered to a natural end, in the attainment of which they find their happiness or perfection. In Hobbes' own words, "there is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor sum- mum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers." Human beings are universally actuated, not by a desire for the good of reason, but by an amoral passion, and not the most noble one at that; to wit, the fear of violent death, which constitutes the sole foundation on 38 BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE which a viable theory of justice can be erected. For, as Hobbes observes elsewhere, "as often as reason is against a man, so often will a man be against reason." To be sure, reason is still involved in the process, but only in an instrumental capacity, that is to say, as a faculty whose function is to "reckon consequences" and, by so doing, in- sure one's self-preservation. This is not to suggest for one mo- ment that the bishops are pure and simple Hobbesians; far from it. Like most contemporary ethicists, they are vastly more influenced by Kant and his latter-day disciples, who managed to give the original rights theory a more exalted status by grounding it, not in a selfish pas- sion, but in practical reason or the dignity of the individual person as an autonomous moral agent. Yet in the final analysis, Kant's theory is still only a modification of the Hob- besian theory, whose nonteleological orienta- tion it preserves and with which it has more in common than it does with classical moral philosophy. Rights remain paramount and the actualization of the just social order is made to depend more on institutions than on moral character. Virtue, although desirable, is not essential to the scheme, and one need not acquire it in order to reap its benefits. Human beings may stay as they are as long as the laws under which they live are as they ought to be. The only condition is that these laws be devised in such a way as to be equally favorable to everyone, to scoundrels no less than to saints. Wars will disappear, not because their atrocities offend one's moral sense, but because with the progress of modern science they are rapidly becoming too costly, if not downright suicidal. Com- merce will curb the spread of religious fanaticism and bind people together more closely than ever before. A strong league of nations will insure the proper relations among the peoples of the world, and a day is coming when no one will have to worry about sacrificing himself for the good of others. In Kant's famous phrase, the per- fectly just society does not require that the bulk of its citizens be angels or even minimally decent human beings; it can be made up entirely of "devils," on condition that they be intelligent. The key to its proper functioning is not genuine moral virtue, on which one can rarely depend, but en- lightened self-interest. compassion, for all its attractiveness, is a passion, only distantly related to what the Christian tradition calls 'mercy' and 'charity, ' both of which, as virtues, require the control of reason. I am well aware that the preceding ac- count of the relationship between premodern and modern ethical thought runs counter to what is still far and away the most fashionable view among present-day scholars, the majority of whom look upon the rights doctrine as nothing more than the perfected version of the old natural law doctrine. Ac- cording to that interpretation, there is no real breach of continuity between premodern and modern thought. The latter is a child of the former, whose intention it does not oppose but rather seeks to fulfill more effectively. Such was the position taken a short genera- tion ago by Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray, and such also is the one taken in our day by John Finnis and Felicien Rousseau, to name only a few Catholic thinkers who speak for a host of others in this regard. It is emphatically not the posi- tion taken by the early modern thinkers themselves, all of whom were firmly con- vinced that, like Columbus, they had discovered a new continent and stood on fundamentally different ground. Modernity, they thought, had its own independent prin- ciple and was not to be viewed as a mere prolongation of what had gone on before. At the deepest level, it owed nothing of impor- tance to either the classical or Christian tradi- tion, from which it was separated by an abyss. The issue was stated with the utmost clarity, for the last time or just about, by Jonathan Swift, who pictured the two camps as solidly entrenched, each on its own sum- mit, which neither was willing to surrender to the other. It is only with Hegel and, some years later, with Nietzsche, that a powerful attempt was made to bridge the chasm be- tween them by showing that the modern world was nothing other than the culmina- tion of a process that had been unfolding since the dawn of history or, in Nietzsche's case, since the dawn of philosophic BOSTOX COLLEGE MAGAZINE 39 consciousness. And it is from them that the unitary conception of the development of Western thought was passed on to assorted philosophers and historians down to our time. We shall gain a clearer understanding of what is at stake in all of this if, by way of illustration, we glance ever so briefly at a few of the specific issues with which the bishops have been confronted or to which they have been forced to address themselves. One of these is abortion, the case against which, not sur- prisingly, they now base on the rights of the unborn. Earlier theologians would have begun by asking, not what abortion does to the foetus, but what it does to the person who performs it or undergoes it. Duties took precedence over rights and determined the conduct that was appropriate in a given set of circumstances. The more complex the case, the more it called for deliberation in the light of certain general principles which re- main the same at all times but whose degree of applicability varies greatly from one in- stance to another. Considerable room was thus left for prudence, through the exercise of which one could hope to arrive at a sen- sible decision. The same cannot always be said of the argument from rights, which deprives us of the ability to determine in a principled way which of the two supposedly unconditional rights, that of the mother or that of the unborn child, has the green light when they come into conflict with each other. whatever gems of Christian wisdom may be embedded in the pastorals are lost in a maze of academic detail and references that only a specialist or a born masochist would care to look up. Nor is this all. On the ground that all human life is sacred, some bishops have been invoking the same principle to ban not only abortion but nuclear warfare and capital punishment as well. Actions as disparate as the taking of an innocent life, the execution of a common criminal, and the defense of one's country against a foreign invader have been lumped together and condemned in the name of a would-be "consistent ethic of life" or an abstraction derived from modern science, which in large part is what I take the rights doctrine to be. Perhaps there are no ready-made solutions to any of these prob- lems, but even a morally sensitive person may find it strange to see them treated as if they were identical. A similar problem arises in connection with the church's efforts to deal with theologians who dissent from its official teaching. Having endorsed the principle of freedom of conscience and freedom of ex- pression, the bishops have been hard pressed to defend the sanctions imposed by Rome on some of the dissenters. One cannot publicly proclaim the rights of the individual con- science and then take action against the per- son who exercises them and thus appears to have justice on his side. It might be replied that the church, too, has its rights, which need to be defended when they are infringed. But, never having been spelled out with the same degree of precision, these rights remain somewhat vague or less compelling than the ones claimed by and guaranteed to the in- dividual person. The problem becomes even more acute when one considers that the dissenter is himself a member of the organization whose rights are being urged against him. All of this is to say that the church is having to pay a price for espousing the principles of the Enlightenment along with their hidden premise, the ideology of progress. Only a stronger notion of the com- mon good, coupled with a more subtle for- mulation of the notion of individual rights, could justify its stance and posture in regard to this thorny problem. My last series of comments concerns the bishops' teaching on the economy and their so-called "preferential option for the poor," one of the pivots of that teaching, where the argument is again made predominantly in terms of rights. One can hardly fault the bishops for wanting to do something about the scandalous persistence of pauperism in the midst of a society that is daily becoming more prosperous. On this score, they are merely heeding the injunctions of the Bible, which, as they correctly point out, evinces a good deal of concern for the poor, the af- 40 BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE flicted, and the underprivileged. Unlike the bishops, however, the Bible never goes so far as to propose that something might be owed to them simply by reason of their poverty. Here as elsewhere, it looks at the problem from the standpoint of the doer of the righteous or merciful deed rather than that of its beneficiary. The good Samaritan is the one who is indebted to the man who had fallen among thieves for the opportunity to serve him, and not vice versa. The thrust of the New Testament message is that the Christian, who has received everything from God, must imitate Him by sharing his super- fluous goods with those who lack the necessities of life. The poverty about which it speaks is more often than not spiritual pov- erty, which sometimes goes hand in hand with material poverty but which cannot be equated with it. God wants all people to be saved, the rich as well as the poor. It is true, as the bishops likewise remind us, that Jesus himself lived in a ten- thousandfold poverty and did not have a stone on which to rest his head; but it is also true that he had some fairly rich friends, whom he does not condemn and of whose hospitality he was quite willing to avail himself. And he apparently had no qualms about allowing his equally improvident disciples to steal a few ears of corn from neighboring fields from time to time. Im- agine what human society would be like if everybody were to live like that! On balance, one is almost tempted to say that the Bible is more concerned with the rich than with the poor. From its perspective, they are the ones who need help. Besides, if the poor are really closer to God, I suppose one should think twice before robbing them of their poverty. Even more striking is the fact that the New Testament has nothing at all to say about the reform of social structures or the establishment of institutions geared to the relief of human misery. What the bishops and others today call "social justice," as distinguished from, say, legal justice, is a nineteenth-century invention usually at- tributed to the Roman Catholic theologian Taparelli d'Azeglio, who never bothered to clarify its meaning and thus created a prob- lem with which social ethicists have had to struggle ever since. The pedigree of that ill- fated notion can easily be traced to Rousseau, who did call for the reform of society along egalitarian lines. The change was a momentous one. Prior to that time, everybody took it for granted that one was rewarded by society in the measure of one's services to it. Widows, orphans, and the vic- tims of undeserved misfortune were obvi- ously to be cared for, but they presented a special case demanding special treatment. Rousseau went further, stipulating that rewards were to be meted out on the basis of need rather than merit. The less one was in a position to contribute to society, the more one could expect from it. Compassion rather than reason became the stamp of human dignity and would henceforth dictate one's comportment toward the needy. The battle cry was taken up by countless authors I he vast amount of time, energy, and resources devoted to practical issues risks being interpreted as a tacit acquiescence in what has been described as the demise of transcendental Christianity. throughout the century that followed. In the Legend of the Centuries, Victor Hugo could say of a horse that steps aside to avoid trampling a toad: "Wiser than Socrates and greater than Plato" — Plus sage que Socrate et plus grand que Platon. But compassion, for all its attrac- tiveness, is still, as its name indicates, a pas- sion. It is only distantly related to what the Christian tradition calls "mercy" and "charity," both of which, as virtues, require the control of reason. John Stuart Mill was not far off the mark when he noted a century and a half ago that the new mood among Christians owed more to Rousseau's sen- timental deism than it did to the spirit of the gospel, for which neither he nor Rousseau had much use. But if social, rather than personal, reform is the key to the problems of civil society, training in virtue loses much of its impor- tance. There is no real need to dwell on it, and, in fact, the bishops show relatively little interest in it. Like their modern predecessors, they appear to have more faith in institu- tions, or so one gathers, for example, from the list of concrete proposals to which more BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE 41 than half of their pastoral on the economy is dedicated, and which includes such specific items as tax reform, the reform of the inter- national economic system, the right to employment, trade unions, farm policy, food distribution, cooperation with firms and in- dustries, national and international coopera- tion, welfare programs, job training and job- creation programs, and foreign investments. Part of the danger is that the vast amount of time, energy, and resources devoted to practical issues of this sort risks being inter- preted as a tacit acquiescence in what Robert Nisbet has described as the demise of trans- cendental Christianity. One begins to wonder whether the bishops have not abandoned their most important task for the sake of a possibly more urgent one. That it should sometimes be necessary to do this goes without saying. If my house is burning, I had better put the fire out, even if that means postponing any attempt to figure out what the bishops are up to. Unfortunately, there are always urgent matters to be taken care of; but if I am constantly preoccupied with them, I shall never be able to attend to the others. What is more, paying the proper attention to important matters at the right time is often the best way to forestall emergencies. It is curious, to say the least, that bishops, whose first duty is to preach the gospel, should suddenly have become so obsessed with problems that Christianity has always identified as the proper province of the civil authorities. As a professor of Catholic theology, I find it regrettable that I cannot recommend their texts to my students with- out inviting a minor disaster. In the vast ma- jority of cases, these students come away from them with the feeling that they can do better by reading the works of experts on the subject. Whatever gems of Christian wisdom may be embedded in them are lost in a maze of academic detail and references that only a specialist or a born masochist would care to look up. By contrast, the same students re- spond with enthusiasm to books such as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which give them an inkling of what the world would be like if we were all better human beings or of what they could see in it if they themselves were to become better human beings. It surprises them that the bishops, to whom they still look up, should spend so much time talking about self- preservation (as they do in the letter on nuclear warfare) and about comfortable self- preservation (as they do in the letter on the economy), and so little time talking about the love of the good and the beautiful. Few ob- ject strenuously to any of the specific points made in those letters, which they are quite willing to accept as one opinion among others, but they unconsciously resist what they perceive as an attempt to reduce Chris- tianity to a teaching on rights or a form of deontological moralism. I began by suggesting that the bishops' teaching was predicated on a bifurcated an- thropology, one part of which reflects a teleological and the other a nonteleological view of nature. It might be more accurate to say that it suffers from the lack of any definite anthropology. A pastoral letter is ad- mittedly not the best place to engage in remote philosophic disquisitions about the nature of the human being, but one would nonetheless expect its authors to exhibit a greater awareness of the theoretical implica- tions of the doctrines expounded in it. It is no accident that the bishops have failed to win the wholehearted support of at least two groups of sympathetic critics within their own fold: the Neo-Conservatives, who agree with them about the end or ends pursued in their letters, but disagree about the the means to those ends, and a smaller or less noisy band of scholars who perversely insist that there can be no fruitful discussion of the means unless the ends themselves are first clarified. My point, and it is the only one I have tried to make, is that the bishops may have confused some of their readers by using language that looks in two different directions at once: that of rights or freedom on the one hand, and of virtue, character formation, and the common good on the other....
[https://archive.org/stream/bostoncollegemags1988bost/bostoncollegemags1988bost_djvu.txt]Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia and for the restoration of the Church.Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.I ask all The Catholic Monitor readers to also pray for the end of this war. Watch "Trump Calls Putin To Get Iran War Offramp! w/ Scott Ritter" on YouTube: ...Read more Please Pray for Trump to end the Iran War: Watch "Trump Calls Putin To Get Iran War Offramp! w/ Scott Ritter" on YouTubeFranklin & Graham calls on Christians to pray for 'end to the bloodshed' ahead of Trump-Putin summit...7mo
Please Pray for Trump to end the Iran War: Watch "Trump Calls Putin To ...
Daily news from a Catholic perspective on issues relating to current events in the Catholic Church, world politi...
Conclave Notes:
-- Open letter urges Pope Leo XIV to correct ‘scandalous incoherence’ in Amoris Laetitia...[Wow! Even notorious Popesplainer Fr.] Harrison warns that Pope Francis taught a ‘dangerous self-contradiction’ on Communion for the divorced and ‘remarried,’ petitioning Pope Leo to correct the record. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/08/open-letter-urges-pope-leo-xiv-to.html]-- Dr. Seifert, regarded as one of the greatest living Catholic philosophers, founding Rector of the International Academy of Philosopher & friend of John Paul II, to Cardinals: INVESTIGATE FRANCIS' HERESIES, VALIDITY BEFORE THE CONCLAVE.."If Francis is found guilty of heresy or apostasy, then: - His cardinal appointments would be invalid" [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/dr-seifert-philosopher-personal-friend.html]-- Are the Cardinals who will participate in the upcoming conclave authentically appointed & morally justified in voting, or will the shadow of Francis's possible illegitimacy cast itself over the next papacy? [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/are-cardinals-who-will-participate-in.html]
-- 5 Dubia Questions for 1P5's Steve Skojec & All faithful Catholics especially Francis is definitely Pope Cardinals, Bishops & pundits [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/06/5-dubia-questions-for-steve-skojec.html]
Francis Notes:
l– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:
“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html
– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html
– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html
– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:
The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”
– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:
“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”
– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:
“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.Election Notes:
– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]
– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html
– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1
– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the [J6] DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”:
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1]Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.
Pray an Our Father now for America.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
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