The Youcat (“youth catechism”) published under Ratzinger’s non-papacy. 

In all three countries, Ireland, Argentina, and Poland, the guilt for this defection from Catholic morals (see my previous post) must be placed upon the Novus Ordo clergy. For of all the countries of the world these three are among the most predominantly Catholic, and the Catholic clergy were in a perfect position to influence the population away from these moral atrocities.

In the 1950’s, when the United States was 25% Catholic (now only about 20%), the Catholic clergy were able to keep dirty and filthy Hollywood in relatively good order by a wonderful institution known as the Legion of Decency. Scripts would have to be altered and scenes deleted by Hollywood producers in order to obtain the approval of the Legion. In Catholic school, I remember receiving every week a mimeographed sheet indicating what films were being played at the local theaters, each film receiving a rating from the Legion. A-1 was for general patronage; A-2 was for adults and adolescents; A-3 was for adults; B was termed “morally objectionable in part for all.” C was “condemned,” something reserved for pure pornography.

We were told that it was a mortal sin to see a B picture — and that included adults. Every year on December 8th, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the whole parish would stand up at Mass, at the moment of the announcements, and recite the pledge of the Legion of Decency, whereby we promised not to see the dirty films. In my house, the sheet which we received from school was posted in the kitchen. Any permission to go see a movie was subjected immediately to the rating given to it by the Legion of Decency.

I bring this up in order to show the tremendous power of the Catholic Church in a Protestant country, the United States, to influence public morality.

The decay of morality among Catholics must be placed at the feet of the Novus Ordo clergy. While it is true that a number of them have striven against public immorality either in their sermons or through the media, they are pitifully few, and in most cases do not enjoy the support of the Novus Ordo hierarchy.

If the bishops of Ireland, Argentina, and Poland had made a concerted effort against the legalization of these wicked sins, there is no way in which these offenses against God’s law would have passed.

Vatican II is the cause of the moral decay, since its very soul is relativism in regard to truth. As much as objectivity of truth characterized pre-Vatican II Catholicism, both in dogma and in morals, this new relativism is what pervades all of the post-Vatican II era. The eldest child of this relativism is ecumenism, which holds that non-Catholic religions are means of salvation. Implicit in this statement is that God does not care what religion you belong to, or what dogmas you adhere to, as long as you have an interior personal relationship with Him. In this system, all religions are true, and all are means of salvation. Ecumenism’s ugly little sister is religious liberty, whereby conscience is extolled above the Church’s magisterium, generating a supposed God-given right to practice whatever religion you believe.

This relativism in regard to truth is what has destroyed Catholicism in all of the institutions which were once Catholic. It has also destroyed the clergy’s ability to insist upon Catholic morality in the public sphere. It has destroyed unity of faith among Catholics, the label “Catholic” now referring only to adherence to an institution, but not to a set of dogmatic or moral tenets. Add to this the other Novus Ordo ideas which have been popularly spread by this new religion, such as “everyone is going to heaven” and “there is no hell,” and “we all worship the same God.” The result is a feckless and useless clergy incapable of transmitting the Catholic Faith.

Their sermons are boring and trite, not concerned about objective Catholic dogma and morality, but about purely naturalistic ideas of being good to your neighbor, being concerned about the environment, and being generally “nice.” Funeral sermons are not about purgatory and judgement, but about the fact that the deceased is in heaven, usually playing golf with God, or mowing God’s lawn, making spaghetti (if she’s Italian) or some other vapid or inane activity which characterized the deceased in this life.

We must further add the effect of the new catechisms, which came into being in the 1960’s, and which, through a failure to present the Catholic Faith in an objective question- and-answer method, ruined the virtue of faith in Catholics who were subjected to them. They presented the typically Modernist doctrine that God is discovered through a personal religious experience, and not through a knowledge of dogmas which are adhered to by the virtue of faith. Modernism is the most lethal enemy of the virtue of faith, and we have seen the result of this poisoning of souls in the public immorality and worse, in the legalization of immorality, indeed in the murder of babies and unnatural vice, both abominations in God’s eyes in countries which were once staunchly Catholic.

The Novus Ordo clergy, as a whole, and with only a few exceptions, are guilty of this moral apostasy and have on their hands the blood of the innocent babies who will be aborted in these once Catholic countries.

Did Bergoglio say anything to the Catholic voters in Ireland before the referendum? Not a single word. Did he intervene at all in his own native land to prevent the legalization of abortion in Argentina? Not at all.

In regard to unnatural vice, he recently told a “gay” man that God made him that way. He addressed these words to a certain Juan Carlos who is one of the victims of sex abuse in Chile on the part of the Novus Ordo clergy: “Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like that and he loves you like that and I do not care. The Pope loves you as you are, you have to be happy with who you are.”

The implications of this statement are both blasphemous and morally disastrous regarding Juan Carlos. It is blasphemous, inasmuch as it makes God the cause of what is clearly a disorder. It would be like saying to someone born with muscular dystrophy (a very debilitating genetic disease) that “God made you that way,” and that “you have to be happy with who you are.” Or it would be the same as telling an electrician who is so insane that he thinks that male couplings should be attached to other male couplings, and female to female, that “God made you that way and he loves you like that.” The comment, furthermore, encourages Juan Carlos to act in accordance with his disordered appetite. The advice from a truly Catholic priest would be that the person afflicted with this disorder must do all in his power to resist the inclinations of this faulty desire.

Implicit in this statement of Bergoglio’s, which is totally in accordance with many other statements and actions of his, is that the appetite justifies the object of the appetite. In other words, “if I am inclined to this, it must be all right, since I find this urge within myself.” This attitude, which is prevalent in all modern society, is typical of the modern intellectual disease of relativism, namely that there are no objective norms, but that it is the subject (the person) who determines the object. In other words, “something is right because I want it,” and not the other way around, that is, “I want something because it is right.” The same is true about religion: “Something is true because I believe it,” and not “I believe something because it is true.”

If we apply this principle of appetite justifying the object of appetite, the effects are horrifying. What about people who have as a lust object the murdering and dismembering of other people? This is a true appetite in some people.

It is of no wonder that nearly all of the cases of child abuse in the Catholic clergy came after Vatican II. For the subjectivism and relativism unleashed by the council caused the breakdown of all of the constraints of holy purity, so intrinsic to Catholic spirituality, and especially the purity of the priests. There was a spirit of “all hell breaking loose” after the council, a spirit of revolution against the traditional constraints of morality demanded of priests. This was because the council caused, particularly in the clergy, who understood the principles of the council and were most affected by them, a weakening or a downright abandonment of the faith, especially in the sacredness of their own priesthood. The New Mass did much to promote this decomposition of the virtue of faith, as it reduced the priest to a mere president presiding over a protestantized and man-centered liturgy, dictated by what Fr. Cekada calls the Ladies’ Soviet, that is, the parish liturgical committee whose members consisted mostly of opinionated and domineering battle-axes. Given this reduction of the priest, and given the general principle that appetite justifies the object of your appetite, and given the abandonment of the traditional spirituality of mortifying one’s evil inclinations, the effect was almost inevitable: anyone inclined to child molestation would use the vantage point of his priesthood to lure unsuspecting and trusting young persons into very serious sins of impurity.

Another very grave element contributing to the immorality of clergy after Vatican II is the abandonment of clerical attire. The traditional Canon Law requires priests to wear clerical attire at all times in public unless there is a serious reason why they cannot or should not. (Hence it was not required, obviously, that a priest wear his collar when he is swimming or camping out). Most Novus Ordo priests today are unrecognizable as priests in their dress, which has the effect of making them relax too much in public, becoming “one of the guys,” and of permitting them to do immoral things without being noticed as clergy. Traditional Canon Law states that a priest would commit mortal sin of the went for more than three days without clerical attire, unless he had a sufficient reason.