Christopher Ferrara: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Christopher A Ferrara POSTED: 2/11/13 REMNANT COLUMNIST, New Jersey ______________________

(www.RemnantNewspaper.com) It has been my great privilege to write for this venerable journal regarding some of the most important events in recent Church history, including the election of Pope Benedict XVI, which Michael Matt and I were fortunate enough to witness in Rome itself beneath the very balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica. But how does one gather his wits on such short notice to offer a useful assessment of an event as epochal as the abdication of a Roman Pontiff, and in particular this Pontiff, whose dramatic gestures have favorably altered the landscape of our devastated ecclesial commonwealth in ways we could only hope for during the long and increasingly ruinous pontificate of John Paul “the Great.”

Two questions immediately present themselves: Can a Pope resign, that is, abdicate, and why did Pope Benedict do so? The first is easily answered, at least technically. As the Catholic Encyclopedia observes: “Like every other ecclesiastical dignity, the papal throne may also be resigned.” Indeed, “[t]he reasons which make it lawful for a bishop to abdicate his see, such as the necessity or utility of his particular church, or the salvation of his own soul, apply in a stronger manner to the one who governs the universal church.” And while there is no higher earthly authority to which a Pope can tender his resignation, “he himself by the papal power can dissolve the spiritual marriage between himself and the Roman Church.” We can dispense by anticipation with any contrary canonical arguments we can expect hear from the amateur canonists of the Internet. None other than Pope Boniface VIII, that great exemplar of the papal supremacy, decreed the inherent capacity of a Pope to resign his own office, which decree is codified in the Corpus Juris Canonici (Cap. Quoniam I, de renun., in 6).

So, technically and logically at least a Pope has the capacity to renounce his own office as Vicar of Christ. And the abdication of a Pope, while exceedingly rare, is not unprecedented. There are several examples, including the well-known abdication of Pope Celestine V in 1294. One case is particularly striking: Pope Benedict IX (1033-44), who “had long caused scandal to the Church by his disorderly life, freely renounced the pontificate and took the habit of a monk,” to be succeeded by Clement II. (Benedict IX attempted to reclaim the papal throne after Clement’s death, but evidently failed in the endeavor).

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A Catholic Manhattan Declaration

We'll take Manhattan. The Declaration has a kind of exiting flavor to it when you name it after Manhattan.

Christopher Ferrara

(Posted 12/31/09 www.RemnantNewspaper.com) Two months after World War I began, with Christmas approaching, Pope Benedict XV, in his encyclical Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum (1914), echoed the judgment of both of his immediate predecessors on the state of what the French political philosopher Pierre Manent has rather mordantly described as “the new world of human liberty.” And Pope Benedict wanted to be clear that “it was not the present sanguinary strife alone” that had prompted him to continue in the line of papal pessimism about political modernity. “There is another evil raging in the very inmost heart of human society,” he wrote, “a source of dread to all who really think, inasmuch as it has already brought, and will bring, many misfortunes upon nations, and may rightly be considered to be the root cause of the present awful war.”

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That Fraud Called “Liberty”

by Christopher A. Ferrara
December 11, 2009
In the public schools that are temples of the civic religion of secularism in the post-Christian West, schoolchildren imbibe a fairy tale.

According to the fairy tale, the downtrodden masses of the 18th and 19th centuries, “yearning to be free,” threw off the “tyranny of priests and kings” and established “government of the people” for the first time in human history, thus achieving the sacred Liberty for which — so the children are told incessantly — men have laid down their lives in countless wars.

But how is it that Liberty has meant more bloodshed than any king ever inflicted, including the French Revolutionary Wars, with their millions of victims, and the American Civil War, with 600,000 dead — the bloodiest civil war in human history up to that time?

How is it that Liberty has meant a level of taxation and government intrusion into daily life that the kings of old would have considered madness?

How is it that Liberty has meant less and less freedom for the good, the true and the beautiful, and more and more freedom for the bad, the false and the ugly, with each passing year?

And how is it that those who heap endless praise on Liberty do not seem to notice the vast pile of bodies sacrificed in its name, including hundreds of millions of unborn children, the victims of “reproductive choice”? (And let us not blame only the Supreme Court for the abortion holocaust, since abortion is more or less legal in all fifty states and every Western nation by the “will of the people.”)

Most Americans are unaware that Spain still has a king, Juan Carlos, who still has the right under the Spanish Constitution of 1978 to promulgate the laws passed by the Spanish parliament, without which the laws do not become effective. Yes, according to the fairy tale of Liberty, there is still a “tyrant” on a throne in Spain.

But how is it that that “tyrant” is himself the victim of tyranny? For by the “will of the people,” the Spanish parliament, under the socialist Zapatero government, has enacted a liberal abortion law, and the king is now expected either to sign it or abdicate.

Yes, the “tyrant” must bend to the “will of the people” and authorize the mass murder of innocents, or else abandon his “tyrannical” throne, so that the killing can begin in the name of Liberty.

As LifeSiteNews observes, however (December 7, 2009), Juan Carlos the “tyrant” is too weak to stand up to the forces that demand the shedding of innocent blood. While “Prominent Spanish Catholics are calling on the king to refuse to sign the law,” Juan Carlos has already signed into law the “gay marriage” legislation enacted by the Zapatero government, stating: “I’m not the king of Belgium.”

Juan Carlos was referring to the “tyrant” King Baudouin of Belgium, who in 1990 (as LifeSiteNews notes) “temporarily renounced his throne rather than sign his country’s law liberalizing abortion.” Then there is that “tyrant” Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, “who refused last year [2008] to sign the duchy’s law legalizing euthanasia and who may be stripped of his constitutional powers as a result.”

And this is the “freedom” from the “tyranny of kings and priests” that we are expected to celebrate as our “leaders” tax us, regulate us, wage war after war, and oppress us in a hundred ways no king of Christendom would even have dreamed of imposing on his subjects.

Behold the fraud called “Liberty”, whose very essence is a negation of the true freedom of which Our Lord — the King of all creation — spoke: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

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