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Letter #1: Sunday, January 3, 2021: "We are not alone"

[2021-01-04]
[Engleză]
Sunday, January 3, 2021

 Dear friends,

 My heartfelt best wishes to you for a blessed, happy New Year.

 The central point of my own reflection in recent weeks — the days of Advent and of Christmas itself and of the final days of the 2020 "virus year," and the first hours of the year 2021 — has been on healing and redemption.

 More precisely, on the reality of healing and redemption after injury, abuse, sin, and the consequent reality of ruining, destroying, casting away what is good and noble and beautiful in ourselves and others.

 The truth is, there can be healing.

 Healings are throughout the Gospels, and the history of the Church.

 And we must find a way to communicate that truth, and participate in that ministry.

 This is an essential calling of the Christian.

 Through love, through forgiveness, through patience (a form of suffering), and, above all, through that mysterious, mystical, divine grace, that "gentle breeze" which testifies in its puzzling elusiveness to the presence of the holy Author of all that is, and has been, and will be, healing may come.

 Healing may come, of things that have died, of things that, heartbreakingly, have been ruined.

 Yes, through the power of that glory, the "Shekinah" of God -- whose holiness and lovingkindness also work through these "vessels of clay" which all of us are -- healing may come...

 Healing, the wiping away of tears, may come... the casting out of demons may come... the return to innocence and one's right mind may come... the recovery of hope, and faith, and joy may come.

 Salvation may come upon us, in our imprisonments of every type.

 This, it seems to me, or has seemed to me in these last days, is the essential story of the Gospel.

 Of Christmas.

 This is the "Good News" — the good news that "people who have dwelt in darkness" may hope to hear proclaimed, and may dare to believe.

 I write this because I, like so many of you, have remained rather silent before many of the events and sorrows and proclamations and exhortations of our time: the virus; the lockdowns; the millions of children wearing masks and staying in their homes for months on end, looking at computer screens; the general confusion in our culture about the nature and purpose of the lives of men and women; the self-loathing and self-hatred that has come upon so many of us along with isolation and a sense of purposelessness, powerlessness, helplessness, indeed, desperation; a media that shouts one thing, then another, until we simply wish to block our eyes and ears from all the half-truths and un-truths; a medical, political and corporate technocratic leadership which publishes fervid urgings and authoritarian proclamations, presenting themselves as the prophets of a "better future" but often, seemingly, fully co-opted by powerful corporate interests, and perhaps, also, by considerable self-interest.

 Such are some of the challenges and sorrows of our time.

 In this situation, do we not long to hear a sincere word of healing, a reliable word of coming redemption?

 I do not think many of us truly rejoice to learn that we may have our genetic code altered so that we can, say, live 700 years instead of 70, or may, by inserting chips into our brains, think faster than a quantum computer so as to be able to calculate, for example, the location of all of our distant relatives and friends throughout the world just by a blink of an eye.

 No, rather I think we truly wish, in our heart of hearts, to learn that we, as persons, as souls, may be transformed by the renewal of our minds, of our souls, by "putting on Christ," the anointed King, so that in His Spirit, we may be in a calm communion of filial confidence with His Father, the very Creator of the universe, the source and final cause of those very elements out of which the quantum computer and the implantable chip may be created by the marvelous, but too often arrogant and reckless, intellects of men.

 We do not, I think, wish to be dominated by the creations of men, but rather we truly wish to becomes the very sons and daughters of God — and, having become such sons and daughter in this temporal world, then, after seven, or 70, or 700 years, to live with the holy God eternally where He Himself heals all wounds, makes all things new, renews all minds and hearts, and wipes away all tears.

 These are two different visions.

 I would like to write and fight for the traditional Christian vision of the true purpose and true happiness of men, a vision I believe is shared by the traditional religious sense we discover emerging as a longing, as a nostalgia for the return to intimacy with the divine, in all human cultures, from the beginning of time up until now.

 And I would like all of you readers who might wish to join me in this effort to do so, by your letters and communications to me, and by forwarding these emails. 

 Such are the beginnings of the reflections which this Advent and New Year have brought into my mind.

 With these simple, incomplete, certainly only partial thoughts, I take up once again the publication of these letters, after some weeks of silence to try to listen and to understand what really needs to be said at this time.

 Blessings to all,

 Robert

 (Also, if you would like to support these Letters, which would be helpful, you may do so here. Note that monthly support is a -- much-appreciated, of course -- option; please unclick that option if you wish to make only a one time gift!)

=======================

 Special Note: Archbishop Viganò recently agreed to respond to questions from journalist Elizabeth Yore for a popular American podcast directed by Steve Bannon called "War Room." His answers to her questions will be broadcast tomorrow morning, Monday, January 3, at 11 a.m. on Bannon's live program. Here is a link to the podcast: link. I spoke with Viganò today about the interview, and the political situation in the United States in general, and I expect to have more to say after the interview is broadcast tomorrow. —RM

========================

 "We are not alone"

 A few days ago, I received a meditation written, once again, by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 79, about the very special and unusual Christmas that closed the year 2020 — unusual because many churches seemed likely to remain closed, and many families to remain separated, rather than gathered together, due to concerns about the Coronavirus.

 The meditation is eloquent, powerful, and, yes, likely to be controversial.

 I have to be honest. I have received many emails from readers in recent weeks expressing contrasting concerns about the archbishop's recent writings, and about my publication of his writings in these Letters.

 Some readers have expressed appreciation, saying they are grateful to the archbishop for speaking out with courage and eloquence about the troubling economic, health and social organization issues facing the Church and the world.

 Others, however, have expressed profound disappointment and deep concern over the archbishop's more recent writings, especially with regard to two issues:

 (1) the Coronavirus, its severity, the dramatic government measures taken in response to it, and the proposed vaccines that have already begun to be widely distributed and administered; and

 (2) the controversial US presidential elections and allegations of voting irregularities that continue to be made with insistence, and with equal insistence continue to be denied.

 Some readers have urged me to stop publishing the archbishop's reflections altogether, arguing that his views on these matters, as opposed to his views on matters of specifically Catholic faith and practice, are not authoritative, or even helpful.

 Still, for many reasons, I think the Church, and the world, benefit by a full discussion of even these controversial issues, which in their consequences affect the life and freedom of the Church, and so I feel that the archbishop's contribution should not be censored.

  It is the essential task of human reason to evaluate facts, events, proposals, to arrive at the truth about things. Opinions from one onlooker, like the archbishop, may be partial or exaggerated, but if they are, then they be corrected by bringing forward new evidence, offering neglected facts and a more profound analysis.

 I am opposed, therefore, to the argument that I should cease to publish the archbishop's words and thoughts. I have known the archbishop for many years, I have just published a book about him entitled Finding Viganò (you may purchase the book at this link), and I am preparing a second book on the questions he raises, which I hope to complete soon. His voice has become an important one today, in the Church, and in the world.

 The process of publicly discussing and debating issues about which men and women of good will may have profound disagreements is a necessary process. I oppose proposals to place a priori limitations on the questions that may be raised on such important matters in the Church, and in the world — especially when powerful secular authorities in the media are de-platforming those who wish to discuss these matters in an increasingly comprehensive way.

 A free exchange of ideas seems to me to be an essential constituent of human freedom itself: that we should discuss and debate controversial questions until, through that open process, we may arrive at a consensus about the real truth of things.

 A difficult process, even a perilous one, yet the alternative -- not discussing things, accepting the dogmatic declarations of authority as definitive, without raising any questions -- is not fitting for free men and women.

 Free men and women must arrive at the acceptance of the truth of things freely, based on evidence and logic, not via the imposition of decisions by authorities.

 With these thoughts, I publish the archbishop's Christmas meditation, and welcome comments, criticisms, refutations, testimonies of agreement and, yes, disagreement. I would be willing also to publish such comments in a future Letter.

 My best wishes for a happy New Year, in which we commemorate the 2020th anniversary of the coming of the Lord into the world at a specific time and place, two millennia ago. —RM

***

 A Meditation on Christmas

 by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

 December 13, 2020

 NOLITE TIMERE (“Fear Not!”)

 A Meditation In Expectation of the Birth of the Most Holy Redeemer

Sleep, O Celestial Child:

The nations do not know

Who has been born;

But the day will come

When they shall be

Your noble heritage;

You who sleep so humbly,

You who are hidden in dust:

They will know You as King.

Alessandro Manzoni, Il Natale (1813) (link)

 In less than two weeks, by the grace of God, this year of Our Lord 2020, which has been marked by terrible events and great social upheavals, will draw to a close.

 Allow me to formulate a brief reflection with which to turn a supernatural gaze both towards the recent past as well as the immediate future.

 The months that we leave behind represent one of the darkest moments in the history of humanity: for the first time ever, since the birth of the Savior, the Holy Keys have been used to close churches and restrict the celebration of the Mass and the Sacraments, almost in anticipation of the abolition of the daily Sacrifice prophesied by Daniel, which will take place during the reign of the Antichrist.

 For the first time ever, at the Easter celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection, many of us were forced to assist at Mass and Holy Week services through the internet, depriving us of Holy Communion.

 For the first time, we became aware, with pain and dismay, of being deserted by our bishops and parish priests, who were barricaded in their palaces and rectories out of fear of a seasonal flu that claimed about the same number of victims as in other years.

 We have seen — so to speak — the generals and officers abandon their army, and in some cases they even joined the enemy ranks, imposing on the Church an unconditional surrender to the absurd reasons for the pseudo-pandemic.

 Never, down all the centuries, has so much faint-heartedness, so much cowardice, so much desire to pander to our persecutors found such fertile ground in those who ought to be our guides and leaders.

 And what most scandalized many of us was the realization that this betrayal involved the highest levels of the Hierarchy of the Church much more than the priests and the simple faithful.

 Precisely from the highest Throne, from which we should have expected a firm and authoritative intervention in defense of the rights of God, of the freedom of the Church and the salvation of souls, we have received instead invitations to obey unjust laws, illegitimate norms, and irrational orders.

 And in the words that the media promptly spread from Santa Marta, we recognized many, too many, nods to the insider language of the globalist élite — fraternity, universal income, new world order, build back better, great reset, nothing will be ever be the same again, resilience — all words of the new language, which testify to the idem sentire ["thinking the same"] of those who speak them and those who listen to them.

 It was a true act of intimidation, a thinly-veiled threat, with which our Pastors ratified the pandemic alarm, sowed terror among the simple, and abandoned the dying and the needy.

 In the height of a cynical legalism, it even reached the point of prohibiting priests from hearing Confessions and administering the Last Sacraments to those who were abandoned in intensive care, depriving our beloved dead of religious burial, and denying the Blessed Sacrament to many souls.

 And if on the religious side of things we saw ourselves treated as outsiders and barred access to our churches like the Saracens of old — even as the implacable invasion of illegal immigrants continued to replenish the coffers of the self-styled humanitarian associations — on the civil and political side we discovered that our rulers had a vocation to tyranny: using a rhetoric now disproven by reality, they wanted to make us think of them as representatives of the sovereign people.

 By heads of state and prime ministers, by regional governors and local mayors, the fullest rigors of the law were imposed on us as if we were rebellious subjects, suspects to be placed under surveillance even in the privacy of our own homes, criminals to be chased even in the solitude of the woods or along the seashore.

 We have seen people forcibly dragged by soldiers in anti-riot gear, elderly people fined while they were going to the pharmacy, shopkeepers forced to close their doors, and restaurants that first took costly measures in an effort to comply with the government’s demands only to then be ordered to be closed.

 With bewilderment, we have heard scores of self-styled experts — most of whom are lacking any scientific authority whatsoever and largely in grave conflict of interest due to their ties to pharmaceutical companies and supra-national organizations — pontificating on television programs and on the pages of newspapers about infections, vaccines, immunity, positive tests, the obligation to wear masks, the risks for the elderly, the contagiousness of the asymptomatic, and the danger of seeing one’s family.

 They have thundered at us, using arcane words like “social distancing” and “gatherings,” in an endless series of grotesque contradictions, absurd alarms, apocalyptic threats, social precepts and health ceremonies that have replaced religious rites.

 And as they have terrorized the population — all while being paid lavishly for their pronouncements made at every hour of the day — our rulers and politicians have flaunted their masks in front of all the television cameras, only to then take them off as soon as possible.

 Forced to disguise ourselves as anonymous people without a face, they have imposed a muzzle on us that is absolutely useless for avoiding contagion and actually harmful to our health, but indispensable for their purposes of making us feel subjugated and forced to conform.  

 They have prevented us from being cured with existing and effective treatments, promoting instead a vaccine that they now want to make obligatory even before knowing if it is effective, after only incomplete testing.

 And in order not to jeopardize the enormous profits of the pharmaceutical companies, they have granted immunity for the damage that their vaccines may cause to the population.

 The vaccine is free, they tell us, but it will actually be paid for with taxpayers’ money, even if its producers do not guarantee that it will protect from contagion.

 In this scenario that is similar to the disastrous effects of a war, the economy of our countries lies prostrate, while online commerce companies, home delivery companies, and pornography producers are booming.

 The local shops close but the large shopping centers and supermarkets remain open: monuments to the consumerism in which everyone, even those with Covid, continue to fill their carts with foreign products, German cheeses, Moroccan oranges, Canadian flour, and cell phones and televisions made in China.

 “The world is preparing for the Great Reset,” they tell us obsessively. “Nothing will ever be the same again.”

 We will have to get used to “living with the virus,” subjected to a perpetual pandemic that feeds the pharmaceutical Moloch and legitimizes ever more hateful limitations of our fundamental liberties.

 Those who since childhood have catechized us to worship freedom, democracy, and popular sovereignty today govern us by depriving us of freedom in the name of health, imposing dictatorship, arrogating to themselves a power that no one has ever conferred on them, neither from above nor from below.

 And the temporal power that Freemasonry and the Liberals ferociously opposed in the Roman Pontiffs is today claimed by them in reverse, in an attempt to submit the Church of Christ to the power of the State with the approval and collaboration of the highest levels of the Hierarchy.

 Out of this whole humanly discouraging scenario, an unavoidable fact emerges: there is a chasm between those who hold authority and those who are subjected to it, between rulers and citizens, between the Hierarchy and the faithful.

 It is an institutional monstrum [monster] in which both civil and religious power are almost entirely in the hands of unscrupulous people who have been appointed because of their absolute ineptitude and great vulnerability to blackmail.

 Their role is not to administer the institution but to demolish it, not to respect its laws but to violate them, not to protect its members but to disperse and distance them.

 In short, we find ourselves facing the perversion of authority, not due to chance or inexperience but pursued with determination and following a pre-established plan: a single script under a single direction.

Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com


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