These Last Days News - July 24, 2019
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4-2. Cardinal Brandmuller: Amazon Synod is a Ploy for ‘Radical Re-structuring’ of Church...
“You have reduced My Church, O pastors, to shambles and a mockery. And what shall I do to you, you who will come before Me and say that your teaching has been pure? I shall cast you out and send you into oblivion in the fires!”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, April 2, 1977
“You will cleanse My House of the heretics, the errors, the fallacies, and the liars that you have allowed to enter upon it. You will cleanse it and set My House straight, or I shall come among you and send you out of My House into the fires of eternal damnation.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, December 24, 1976
“Rome, Eternal City, the light is dim. Rome, haven for heretics and all manners of abomination, shall you not cleanse yourself before the Eternal Father places His hand upon you in chastisement?”
- The Bayside Prophecies
St. Michael, December 24, 1975
“How long shall the Eternal Father persevere in hoping that you shall turn from your present ways that are leading souls onto the road to perdition? Hasten, harken, and listen, for the warning given to you now is one of the final warnings being given to mankind.
“All who have given themselves to the pleasures of the flesh, all who have given themselves to the new modes of humanism and modernism set down for ensnarement of the human race by satan, all those who close their ears to Our voices, shall burn!”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, May 28, 1975
THE AGENTS OF 666 NOW ARE LOOSED IN ROME
“The agents of 666 now are loosed in Rome and have entered into the highest places of the hierarchy. It will be bishop against bishop and cardinal against cardinal, till all that remains will come forward out of the cleansing.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, July 25, 1977
“Rome will lose the faith and will become the seat of Antichrist.”
– Our Lady of La Salette, September 19, 1846
The above Messages from Our Lord and Our Lady of the Roses, Mary Help of Mothers were given to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York.
LifeSiteNews.com reported on July 23, 2019:
by Dr. Maike Hickson
Cardinal Walter Brandmüller – one of the two remaining dubia cardinals – published today in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a critique of Professor Hubert Wolf's public and strong attempt at undermining priestly celibacy.
Professor Wolf is a German church historian and one of the participantsof the private and unannounced pre-Amazon Synod June 26 meeting in Rome which called for female deacons and for married priests. Shortly after this meeting, he gave an interview on July 18, in which he claims that obligatory celibacy is “neither a mandate of Christ nor a divine commandment nor an Apostolic mandate.” Thus, Wolf claims, the Church may change this discipline for priests.
Wolf explains that he is in favor of that change and that he wrote a book on this topic for two reasons. The first reason is “the sex abuse scandal,” which, according to the professor, showed that celibacy is “a risk factor.” As a second reason for his new book, Wolf names “the request of the Latin American bishops as to whether the Pope would still remain on the basis of tradition if he were to admit married priests in the Catholic Church.” Thus, he explicitly wrote his book, which is titled “16 Theses Against Celibacy,” in order to assist the organizers of the upcoming October 6-27 Pan-Amazon Synod.
In his own response to Professor Wolf, Cardinal Brandmüller places the statements of Wolf in the larger context of the Amazon Synod when he says: “Just in time, before the controversial Amazon Synod – which has been convoked for October – an article by Hubert Wolf on celibacy appears: 'Marriage and ordination are not in opposition.” The Cardinal is a world renowned-scholar of church history, having published numerous books on the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Reformation. He holds a doctorate in theology and is the former President of the Pontifical Commission for Historical Sciences.
However, continues the German prelate: “Nobody who observes the current situation in the Catholic Church carefully would really believe that the upcoming synod in October is truly about the fate of the Amazon forests and its inhabitants.”
For Brandmüller, “the Amazon” is “merely a label.”
“'The spirit in the bottle' has another name: radical re-structuring of the Church according to the well-known program,” he said.
A key point of that current reform program is, according to the 90-year-old German prelate, celibacy.
“If it [celibacy] falls,” he explains, "then the Church is also done for, as already the Church's enemies had claimed in the late 19th century." The new book by Professor Hubert – whose main claims have been presented by LifeSiteNews here – as well as his above-mentioned interview “are also part of this strategy,” Brandmüller adds.
Among other things, Wolf himself now claims that celibacy really only became the law of the Church when it was placed into the Code of Canon Law of 1917. Here, Brandmüller comments: “Instead of critically examining Wolf's individual claims, it seems more fruitful to point to the real topic. It is to be made clear that obligatory celibacy for candidates of the higher ordination is not based merely on a Church law, which could be omitted or changed by a juridical act on the part of the Pope or a Council.”
Responding to Wolf's claim that celibacy is not a dogma, the German cardinal shows that even this argument does “not convince.”
While it is true that “celibacy is not a doctrine of the Church,” Brandmüller shows how indeed any candidate for the priesthood is “called, alongside with the priesthood also to imitate the way of living of Christ and of His Apostles.” It is on this basis that Brandmüller sees that “celibacy is a genuine part of the Apostolic Tradition.” Tradition, he adds, is “that which the Apostles, by oral homily, by example and instruction have passed on what they have received from Christ's mouth, in dealing with Him, and through His own work, or what they have learned under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”
This Tradition, the prelate adds, “has the same binding nature as Holy Scripture. Both contain Divine Revelation.”
Furthermore, Cardinal Brandmüller also points out that the Apostles, upon being called by Jesus Christ, left house and wife, “in order to follow Christ.” The practice of ordaining older man who were married and had children was then kept for a while in the Church, the church historian explains, but always with the condition that sexual continence is preserved.
“It is evident,” he continues, “that this practice was lived and kept, long before one put it formally into a law.” The fact that there was no strong opposition when the practice was put into law is for Brandmüller also a sign that the practice had long been accepted.
Concludes the prelate: “There is a direct line from the words and the example of Jesus and the Apostles, onto the Corpus Iuris Canonici of the Middles Ages, and right up to the Codex Iuris Canonici of the year 1983.”
Referring to the practice of some Eastern rites of the Church to allow married men to become priests, Cardinal Brandmüller states that this was done for the sake of unity with some Eastern churches that wished, after the Eastern schism, to return to Rome. Looking back, he would have wished the Church would have insisted that this concession be accepted only for the first generation of priests, but that it then had later be ruled out, just as Pope Benedict XVI did it with those Anglican ministers who came into the Catholic Church as married men and who were accepted as Catholic priests.
Cardinal Brandmüller states clearly that there have been many scandals in the Church with regard to celibacy, and that priestly celibacy was not always faithfully kept by priests. However, in spite of these difficulties, he insists that “times of ecclesial-cultural flourishment were always also marked by a loyalty toward celibacy – and vice versa.”
With regard to Professor Wolf's work, Cardinal Brandmüller states that there cannot be talk about “serious historical sciences,” when Wolf points to these detected scandals in the Church's history, but “ignores” the work of “recognized authors” who published books on this topic, such as Henry Crouzel (1963), Roger Gryson (1970), Christian Cochini (1981/1990), Johannes Bours and Franz Kamphaus (1991), Alfons M. Stickler (1993), Stefan Heid (2003), Klaus Berger (2009) and Andreas Merkt (2015).
Cardinal Brandmüller concludes his essay with the reminder that, “in the last 150 years, there was nearly no Pope who did not stress the dignity, spiritual beauty, and fruitfulness of this way of following Jesus.” The reason for this lies, according to this prelate, “in the essence of the priesthood itself.”
The priest “who celebrates on the altar Christ's Sacrifice, does so 'in Persona Christi' and by virtue of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.” “He who is so existentially involved in Christ's work of redemption,” the prelate asks, “should he not therefore also live 'in Persona Christi,' that is to say, to imitate the way of living of his master?”
“There will be an uncanonically elected pope who will cause a great schism, there will be diverse thoughts preached which will cause many, even those in the different orders to doubt, yea, even agree with those heretics which will cause my Order to divide, then will there be such universal dissensions and persecutions that if those days were not shortened even the elect would be lost.”
- St. Francis of Assisi (The Reign of Antichrist, Fr. R. Gerald Culleton)
ROME SHALL BECOME THE SEAT OF ANTICHRIST
“Your world, mankind, is now developing into a one-world government and a one-world religion that will cast aside My Son. Woe, I say unto you, as I cried before, that unless you pray, unless you act now, 666 shall entrench himself in Rome, the Eternal City of Rome, and then it shall become the seat of the antichrist forces. My children, remove the blindness from your hearts and your eyes. Can you not recognize what is happening?
“I cry bitter tears of sorrow. I ask all My children to save My Son's House, His Church upon earth. And how may this be accomplished? By prayer, My children; by good example; constructive criticism. You cannot give full confidence to satan or his agents. You cannot expect another to take your part in this battle of the spirits. Each and every one of conscionable age must now go forward as a bearer of truth and light. These days, My children, are the days that had been spoken of and written of by the prophets of old.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, December 7, 1977
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