Cantalamessa Combines Iconoclasm and Fideism in One Homily

'When we enter ornate and clean Basilicas, adorned with crosses, sacred images, altars and burning lamps, we most easily conceive devotion. But on the other hand, when we enter the temples of the heretics, where there is nothing except a chair for preaching and a table for making a meal, we feel ourselves to be entering a profane hall and not the House of God.’   -St. Robert Bellarmine


Edit: it’s been a while since anyone has paid him much mind.  He’s had some terrible and mostly incoherent sermons in the past with many errors that have a lot in common with the error of religious indifferentism. Coming from the point of view of the laity anyway, it’s difficult to see how the views of Father Cantalamessa square with the views constant in the Church.  It would be nice to have some clarification.

Here, later on in his Good Friday sermon, it’s difficult to see how Father Cantalamessa could be talking about anything else but the destruction of the Catholic Faith and the things of the religion Itself, of course he means also the destruction or the dismissal of its sacramentality.  He wouldn’t be the first wayward religious to have entertained heretical ideas.

Heresy is ugly.

[Zenit] We must do everything possible so that the Church may never look like that complicated and cluttered castle described by Kafka, and the message may come out of it as free and joyous as when the messenger began his run. We know what the impediments are that can restrain the messenger: dividing walls, starting with those that separate the various Christian churches from one another, the excess of bureaucracy, the residue of past ceremonials, laws and disputes, now only debris. 

In Revelation, Jesus says that He stands at the door and knocks (Rev 3:20). Sometimes, as noted by our Pope Francis, he does not knock to enter, but knocks from within to go out. To reach out to the "existential suburbs of sin, suffering, injustice, religious ignorance and indifference, and of all forms of misery." 

As happens with certain old buildings. Over the centuries, to adapt to the needs of the moment, they become filled with partitions, staircases, rooms and closets. The time comes when we realize that all these adjustments no longer meet the current needs, but rather are an obstacle, so we must have the courage to knock them down and return the building to the simplicity and linearity of its origins. This was the mission that was received one day by a man who prayed before the Crucifix of San Damiano: "Go, Francis, and repair my Church".

Link to Fiore’s Circles...