Amazon Synod Report: Pope Francis — ‘I Want the Confusion’
Oct 7, 2019
A PORTENT OF THINGS TO COME: The opening of the Amazon Synod was marked by a pagan protest
TRANSCRIPT
The Amazon Synod kicked off today with tribal songs echoing through the halls of St. Peter’s Basilica, before the pope and synod fathers processed to the synod hall, flanked by indigenous peoples walking barefoot carrying a rainbow-colored fishing net.
The pope took the occasion of his opening address to scold those who commented on tribal headdress, asking, “What is the difference between this headdress, and the biretta used by officials of this dicastery?”
And Cdl. Claudio Hummes, leader of the synod, again stressed the possibility of making exceptions to priestly celibacy in remote regions of the Amazon — also touching on granting women leadership roles in the context of the sacraments: “[F]aced with a great number of women who nowadays lead communities in Amazonia, there is a request that this service be acknowledged and there be an attempt to consolidate it with a suitable ministry for them.”
Just the day before, the opening Mass was marked by a first in the history of Christendom: a pagan protest inside the walls of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Just steps from the High Altar, demonstrators unfurled a banner urging the world to listen to the cry of Mother Earth, before being escorted away by security.
The significance of the event has not been lost on Catholics.
That the walls of the iconic basilica, the seat of global Catholicism, would have been penetrated by pagan protestors is, for critics, symbolic of what Francis has allowed to happen to the Church under his reign — and is a worrying portent of things to come.
Read the source: https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/a-portent-of-things-to-come
PAGAN PRAYER AND TREE PLANTING: Where is this all heading?
October 7, 2019
TRANSCRIPT
And yes, controversial is the most apt term to describe these proceedings.
For example, on Friday, which happened to be First Friday, Pope Francis oversaw a tree-planting, Mother Earth-worshipping ceremony in the Vatican Gardens performed by Amazonian natives.
A group of natives opened up a blanket representing Mother Earth and placed various little statues around the perimeter.
Then, a feathered female shaman lifted her hands in the air and began some prayer ritual to some deity, or Mother Earth, or whoever — but definitely not Jesus Christ.
As the female shaman prayed to whoever or whatever, the rest of the group knelt down in prayer or worship — again, not to Jesus Christ, Lord of the Universe.
The entire sham was covered over by saying the ritual was a consecration of the Amazon Synod to St. Francis, on whose feast day this abomination occurred.
The hijacking of St. Francis by the modernists in the Church and turning him into an effeminate garden ornament is one of the greatest spiritual crimes of the century, but that’s for another Vortex.
There was nothing, absolutely zero, Catholic about this pagan rite carried out just yards from where St. Peter was crucified upside down for the Faith, making this sacred ground.
And big-name modernist members of the hierarchy were present — Brazilian Cdl. Cláudio Hummes, leader of this synod, and Philippine Cdl. Luis Tagle, another supporter of the Church having an Amazonian face.
Of course, Pope Francis was present, who looked extremely awkward when the female shaman went over to him and slipped a black ring onto his finger.
That black ring is a tucum ring, and it actually has a double meaning; it’s part of the whole Mother Earth worship system, but it is also associated with liberation theology.
The shaman’s encounter with the Pope wrapped up with a pretty awkward fist-bump-looking exchange.
And if that wasn’t enough, the next woman pagan worshipper, carrying a wooden statue of a naked pregnant woman, didn’t even know how to make a proper sign of the cross.
But hey, if you’re going to have a Church with an Amazonian face, then you don’t need to know how to cross yourself, you just need your rattle and your Mother Earth blanket, as well as a hefty dose of pagan prayers.
Other gods being prayed to on holy ground, officially watched over by the successor of St. Peter, is yet another example of how far from tradition this pontificate has moved.
When a cardinal relayed to us last week that “there is no faith left in Rome,” he actually may have been understating the issue.
If only it was a question of just no faith.
This is pagan faith, worshipping not actually gods, since there are no other gods, but demons, as St. Paul warns the early Catholics in Corinth when the issue arose of eating meat sacrificed to idols: “I mean that what they sacrifice, [they sacrifice] to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to become participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and also the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons.”
Yet, this is precisely what a Church with an Amazonian face, to quote the non-stop blather emanating from the Vatican, looks like.
The likes of Cláudio Hummes are using the power of the Church to try and destroy the Church.
They have some non-Catholic vision of the Church being not tied to the same principles and truths that have been divinely revealed, or taught throughout the 2,000 years of sacred history, but rather a Church that takes on the appearance and practices of the world and local culture, whatever that looks like.
The Church has oftentimes adopted some local practices or customs from various cultures. The city of Rome itself is a testament to that.
When the Church was freed from persecution by Constantine, and eventually granted the city’s basilicas, which were government buildings, to be used as churches, they didn’t start worshipping the gods of Rome.
Aspects of Roman law and culture and so forth were slowly incorporated into the life of the Church as She emerged from being an underground Church, but She never prayed the prayers to the Roman gods.
What occurred in the gardens of the Vatican this weekend was pagan worship and prayers — period.
And any pretense that it was all fine and OK and no big deal is just that: a pretense.
In a way, it’s more than symbolic, the tree that Francis planted here and then stood in silent prayer before.
It’s a living symbol, a concrete expression of modernism, paganism, worldliness — all of them — boring their roots deep into the Church.
A future pope would be well-advised to grab hold of that tree one day and rip it up by its pagan roots.
Realize that we are going to have to suffer through all of this kind of stuff at least until the next Conclave, which doesn’t itself look too promising to bring any relief.
This past weekend, the Pope made 13 new cardinals, 10 of whom are under 80 and therefore eligible to vote for his successor.
Following Saturday’s elevation, the College of Cardinals is now, for the first time, stacked with a majority of Francis appointees — virtually, although not completely, guaranteeing that Francis II will be who walks out on the loggia at the next papal election.
Read the source: https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vort-pagan-prayer-and-tree-planting
Pope Francis and Schism
NOTE: Robert Royal’s second Synod Report (on the first full day of the 2019 Synod on the Amazon) is up now and may be read by clicking here.
The Church, in her long history, has never been confronted with the situation like the one in which she now finds herself. Pope Francis recently spoke of a possible schism within the Church, a schism that does not frighten him. We have had many schisms in the past, he says, and there will be schisms in the future. So, there is nothing to fear in the present. However, it is the nature of the present possible schism that is new, and this unprecedented new schism is frightening.
One cannot help but think that Francis is referring to members of the Church in the United States. Francis receives, from America, his most theologically challenging and pastorally concerned criticism, which centers on a questionable remaking of the faith and of the Church. Such censure, it is believed by Francis’s cohort, originates from within a conservative intellectual elite who are politically motivated, and many of whom are wealthy.
Francis thinks that they are unwilling to change, and so refuse to accept the new work of the Spirit in our day. Ultimately, one discerns that he believes his critics are psychologically and emotionally impaired, and so must be dealt with gently (though that gentleness is yet to be experienced by those who fall under his vindictive abuse). He himself has called those who oppose him many insulting names.
What Francis does not realize (and his close associates fail to grasp) is that the overwhelming majority of his American critics would never initiate a schism. They recognize that he is the pope and thus the successor of Peter, and that to remain within the Catholic Church is to remain faithful to the pope, even if it entails being critical of the pope in one’s faithfulness to him.
Some may wish that an actual schism will take place in America in order to get rid of the obdurate conservative element and so demonstrate that they were not really Catholic all along. But that is not going to happen, because those critical bishops, priests, theologians, commentators, and laity (more laity than Francis will admit) know that what they believe and uphold is in accord with Scripture, the Church councils, the ever-living magisterium, and the saints.
As has been often noted, Pope Francis and his cohort never engage in theological dialogue, despite their constant claim that such dialogue is necessary. The reason is that they know they cannot win on that front. Thus, they are forced to resort to name-calling, psychological intimidation, and sheer will-to-power.
Now, as many commentators have already pointed out, the German church is more likely to go into schism. The German bishops are proposing a two-year “binding” synod that, if what is proposed is enacted, would introduce beliefs and practices contrary to the universal tradition of the Church.
I believe, however, that such a German schism will not formally happen either, for two reasons. First, many within the German hierarchy know that by becoming schismatic they would lose their Catholic voice and identity. This they cannot afford. They need to be in fellowship with Pope Francis, for he is the very one who has fostered a notion of synodality that they are now attempting to implement. He, therefore, is their ultimate protector.

Second, while Pope Francis may stop them from doing something egregiously contrary to the Church’s teaching, he will allow them to do things that are ambiguously contrary, for such ambiguous teaching and pastoral practice would be in accord with Francis’ own. It is in this that the Church finds herself in a situation that she never expected.
It’s important to bear in mind that the German situation must be viewed within a broader context: the theological ambiguity within Amoris Laetitia; the not so subtle advancing of the homosexual agenda; the “re-foundation” of the (Roman) John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family, i.e., the undermining of the Church’s consistent teaching on moral and sacramental absolutes, especially with regard to the indissolubility of marriage, homosexuality, contraception, and abortion.
Similarly, there is the Abu Dhabi statement, which directly contradicts the will of the Father and so undermines the primacy of Jesus Christ his Son as the definitive Lord and universal Savior.
Moreover, the present Amazon Synod is teeming with participants sympathetic to and supportive of all of the above. One must likewise take into account the many theologically dubious cardinals, bishops, priests, and theologians whom Francis supports and promotes to high ecclesial positions.
With all of this in mind, we perceive a situation, ever-growing in intensity, in which on the one hand, a majority of the world’s faithful – clergy and laity alike – are loyal and faithful to the pope, for he is their pontiff, while critical of his pontificate, and, on the other hand, a large contingent of the world’s faithful – clergy and laity alike – enthusiastically support Francis precisely because he allows and fosters their ambiguous teaching and ecclesial practice.
What the Church will end up with, then, is a pope who is the pope of the Catholic Church and, simultaneously, the de facto leader, for all practical purposes, of a schismatic church. Because he is the head of both, the appearance of one church remains, while in fact there are two.
The only phrase that I can find to describe this situation is “internal papal schism,” for the pope, even as pope, will effectively be the leader of a segment of the Church that through its doctrine, moral teaching, and ecclesial structure, is for all practical purposes schismatic. This is the real schism that is in our midst and must be faced, but I do not believe Pope Francis is in any way afraid of this schism. As long as he is in control, he will, I fear, welcome it, for he sees the schismatic element as the new “paradigm” for the future Church.
Thus, in fear and trembling, we need to pray that Jesus, as the head of His body, the Church, will deliver us from this trial. Then again, he may want us to endure it, for it may be that only by enduring it can the Church be freed from all the sin and corruption that now lies within her, and be made holy and pure.
On a more hopeful note, I believe it will be the laity who bring about the needed purification. Pope Francis has himself stated that this is the age of the laity. Lay people see themselves as helpless, having no ecclesial power. Yet if the laity raise their voices, they will be heard.
More specifically, I believe it will depend mostly on faithful and courageous Catholic women. They are the living icons of the Church, the bride of Christ, and they, in union with Mary, the Mother of God and the Mother of the Church, will birth anew, in the Holy Spirit, a holy Body of Christ.
*Image: The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1617 [Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna]. This is a panel from the altarpiece Rubens painted for the Jesuit community in Antwerp. Francis Xavier was a leading figure in the Counter-Reformation.
Read the source: https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2019/10/08/pope-francis-and-schism/
VATICAN DAMAGE CONTROL: NUN ADMITS AMAZON WOMEN ACTING IN PRIESTS’ ROLES
by Rodney Pelletier • ChurchMilitant.com • October 8, 2019
Religious sisters in the Amazon are “celebrating” marriages and hearing confession without giving absolution
VATICAN CITY (Church Militant.com) – The Vatican is in damage control mode after a comment made by a religious sister revealing that women in the Amazon are already acting like priests.
On Monday, the first day of discussions and presentations of the Synod regarding the priesthood crisis in the Amazon, Sr. Alba Teresa Cediel Castillo, a member of the Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate and of St. Catherine of Siena, an order of sisters from Colombia, revealed that sisters and other women are doing some sacramental duties reserved to priests.
Responding to a question in a Vatican presser regarding the role of women religious in the Amazon, she said, “We focus on education, on healthcare, we carry out projects. We help the indigenous people to develop their own projects promoting development.”
“In all of these places, what do we do?” She continued:
Well, everything that a woman can do, starting from baptism, as prophets and priests, as women priests we accompany people during all events when priests cannot be there. If there is need for a baptism we baptize children. If there is a possibility of marrying, if anybody wishes to get married, we can do that, we can celebrate the marriage. And sometimes we also have to listen to confessions. Of course we cannot give absolution, but at the bottom of our hearts we place ourselves in the position of listening with humbleness thinking about the person who comes to us for a word of comfort. Somebody who, perhaps, before death.
Castillo continues, “At the moment we are working at the inter-congregational level in itinerant teams of men and women who travel on canoe and we cross these huge Amazonian rivers and women’s role within the Church, in my opinion too, has to become greater.”
She added, “We will get there but little by little. We cannot exert too much pressure. I think that through dialogue, through meeting we will be able to respond to the many challenges.”
Faithful Catholics are responding strongly on social media, calling it an attempt to co-opt the male priesthood.

Vatican News Agency, however, issued a different rendition of Castillo’s comments in an article published on Tuesday, titled “Amazonia: the women religious who ‘hear confessions,'” after Catholics expressed alarm.
Rather than using the Vatican’s translator, who rendered an almost literal translation of Castillo’s words, the article paraphrases.
It adds the gloss, “If someone wants to get married, we are present and we witness to the love of the couple.”
The Church does teach the sacrament of baptism can be administered by somebody who is not a priest or deacon in the case of an emergency, namely, if the person is in immediate danger of death.
Synod leaders like Cdl. Lorenzo Baldisseri are claiming the Amazon Synod’s outlining document isn’t authoritative and represents “the voice of the local church.”
In an interview with National Public Radio, Fr. Peter Hughes, an Irish missionary to Latin America, said, “The people of the Amazon, as we all know, have their own vision, their own cosmic vision of reality, where all of life is interconnected,” adding, “This mantra of interconnectedness that the pope underlines is the bedrock of his spirituality and of Christian spirituality.”
Synods never had anything to do with changing doctrine or with changing discipline, said Cdl. Burke.
This was made evident on Saturday when the Pope Francis was present for a pagan tree-planting ceremony in the Vatican gardens.
A female shaman led the ceremony with people bowing, including a Franciscan friar, in apparent worship of the earth.
Austin Ivereigh, a British journalist and apologist for Pope Francis, claimed the ceremony was Catholic and that wooden statues representing two naked and pregnant women were not pagan idols but images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Elizabeth.
In a presser follow-up, however, an Amazonian missionary bishop commented that the statues represent “Mother Earth, fertility, woman, life” and not the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Prominent theologians are condemning the agenda of the synod. American Cdl. Raymond Burke called the synod apostasy and “a direct attack on the Lordship of Christ.”
“The fundamental concept of a synod was to call together representatives of the clergy and the laypeople to see how the Church could more effectively teach and more effectively apply her discipline,” he said.
“Synods never had anything to do with changing doctrine or with changing discipline,” Burke went on to say, adding, “It was all meant to be a way of furthering the mission of the Church.”
Read the source: https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/religious-sister-admits-women-acting-in-priests-rolls-in-the-amazon
The Amazon Synod Has Begun, and Pandora’s Box Is Opened
, OCTOBER 10,2019
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The Synod of Bishops on the Amazon is off to an ominous start. Each day, as more bizarre, jarring, and revolutionary developments emerge, I keep coming back to a line from Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor: “When the cardinals elected Bergoglio they did not know what a Pandora’s box they were opening.”
Shortly before the synod started, Pope Francis and Claudio Cardinal Hummes, the synod’s general relator, hosted a startling indigenous ceremony in the Vatican gardens. Led by a female native of the Amazon region, a group encircling a mandala bowed down before a statue of Pachamama—Mother Earth. A synod official didn’t identify the (apparently nude) statue as the Blessed Virgin Mary, but rather said the image was probably meant to represent “Mother Earth, fertility, woman, life.” An Amazonian tribal leader, meanwhile, said that the ceremony looked decidedly “pagan.”
Another rite of “indigenous mysticism” took place at a pre-synodal meeting of bishops gathered around Cardinal Hummes’s group, the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM), which organized both the Vatican gardens ceremony and the synod. One commentator claimed that the synodal fathers “expect the [ceremonial] broth to be hot enough to ingest, in a kind of communion with the Pachamama.” In August, at another preparatory meeting for the synod, a Colombian shaman “blessed” the religious present.
In the synod’s opening days, more unsettling figures leaped out of Pandora’s box. Cardinal Hummes announced that indigenous communities had “requested” the ordination of married men—the very project Hummes has been pushing since at least 2006. Bishop Erwin Kräutler (reportedly the principal author of the synod’s working document) claimed that “indigenous people don’t understand celibacy,” endorsed a female diaconate, and admitted that the synod is “maybe a step to” women priests. Sr. Alba Teresa Cediel Castillo, a Columbian missionary, explained that women in the Amazon already “baptize children,” “celebrate” marriages, and “listen to confessions” without offering absolution. Even an experimental liturgical rite for the Amazon was proposed.
We now have “two religions within the Catholic Church,” according to historian Roberto de Mattei. The first is traditional Catholicism; the second is “the Amazonian religion,” he argues, charging that the synod’s working document endorses “pantheism and polytheism.”
At a hard-hitting roundtable of Catholic leaders, de Mattei pointed out that revolutions historically have long incubation periods but move dizzyingly fast once they explode. He believes that the current Church revolution has been simmering for 50 to 60 years and that now “it is possible that all will explode very, very rapidly.” The passage from a material schism to a formal schism “could be dramatic and happen very, very, very rapidly.”
Writing in The Catholic Thing on Tuesday, the renowned theologian Fr. Thomas Weinandy published an extraordinary text on “internal papal schism.” Fr. Weinandy predicted that neither an American nor a German schism will “formally happen”—yet, he explained, Pope Francis remains the “ultimate protector” of German leaders who are promoting “ambiguous teaching and pastoral practice… in accord with Francis’s own.” Thus, says Fr. Weinandy:
What the Church will end up with, then, is a pope who is the pope of the Catholic Church and, simultaneously, the de facto leader, for all practical purposes, of a schismatic church. Because he is the head of both, the appearance of one church remains, while in fact there are two.
The only phrase that I can find to describe this situation is “internal papal schism,” for the pope, even as pope, will effectively be the leader of a segment of the Church that through its doctrine, moral teaching, and ecclesial structure, is for all practical purposes schismatic. This is the real schism that is in our midst and must be faced, but I do not believe Pope Francis is in any way afraid of this schism. As long as he is in control, he will, I fear, welcome it, for he sees the schismatic element as the new “paradigm” for the future Church.
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And so Pandora’s box joyously opens ever wider in the current post-modern papacy. To borrow an insight from Richard Spinello: “Pope Francis’s mindset, which so effortlessly tolerates contradictions and polarities, mirrors the post-modern mentality that celebrates disunity and indeterminacy over unity, continuity, and moral closure.”
The pope and his allies have lyricized all the fragmentation and chaos with the shimmering image of the polyhedron. “If we think of it as a precious stone, [the polyhedron] reflects the light which falls upon it in a wonderfully variegated way,” claims Walter Cardinal Kasper in his glowing book on Martin Luther. Sandro Magister, the renowned Vaticanist, is less poetic. For Pope Francis, he says, “the Church must be made precisely like this: ‘polyhedral,’ with many sides. In plainer words: in pieces.”
Another line keeps flashing through my mind: “Today the whole Church is seen dismembered.” It’s from St. Athanasius’s letter to his fellow bishops in the year 340. In it, the saint calls for his brothers to be “scandalized” by the despoiling of the Faith—and to exemplify courageous fidelity in response. “May what has been preserved in the Churches from the beginning down to the present day not be abandoned in our time; may what has been entrusted into our keeping not be embezzled by us.”
If we do not fight for the Faith, how much more will escape from Pandora’s box? As de Mattei powerfully said of the Amazon synod and its errors: “I call upon the Cardinals and Bishops who are still Catholic to raise their voices against this scandal. If their silence continues, we will continue to seek the intervention of the Angels and Mary Queen of Angels, to save the Holy Church from every form of reinvention, distortion and reinterpretation.”
Photo: the statue of Pachamama in the Vatican Garden (Getty Images)

