SAY SO OR FIX THE LINK

By Tim Rohr

Apparently the memorandum issued by the late Archbishop Byrnes placing a "pause" on the formation of new Neocatechumenal communities in this archdiocese has been rescinded - or maybe just erased, since there was no official announcement.  

In any event you won't be able to find it on the archdiocesan website. Instead you will get:

Here. Try it yourself: https://archagana.org/standing-directive-related-to-the-neocatechumenal-way

Meanwhile, Google AI still knows about it:

And the link is still on the archdiocesan website:

But it only goes to "404."

A technical glitch? Maybe. However, as we all know, these sorts of things - when it comes to the neocat power people - are constant: sneak, disregard, deflect, deny, hide, erase...

Meanwhile, it's good that JungleWatch saves everything. Links to the original memorandum and all the documents which came after it can be found in this post.

Note to Archbishop Jimenez. If you've rescinded the moratorium, say so. If not, then fix the link. 

THE SSPX, DAVID, ABSALOM, JOAB AND GUAM

By Tim Rohr

Bishop Athanasius Schneider, a bishop well-known to many of us in Guam after his visit of a few years ago, has appealed to Pope Leo to permit the SSPX to proceed with its announced consecration of bishops. 

Schneider's larger point, though, is even if the SSPX proceeds without papal permission, the act is not schismatic, hardly warrants excommunication, and at most may be an act of disobedience. 

Schneider argues that papal primacy does not unilaterally equate to an absolute requirement of obedience. The pope has primacy in matters of faith and morals but not always in administration - at least that's Schneider's position (and I agree with him).

To buttress his point, Schneider presents the case of St. Athanasius:

"...in 357, St. Athanasius disobeyed the order of Pope Liberius, who instructed him to enter into hierarchical communion with the overwhelming majority of the episcopate, which was in fact Arian or semi-Arian. As a result, he was excommunicated. In this instance, St. Athanasius disobeyed out of love for the Church and for the honor of the Apostolic See, seeking precisely to safeguard the purity of doctrine from any suspicion of ambiguity."

In other words, Pope Liberius had ordered Athanasius "to enter into hierarchical communion" with heretics and a heresy which absolutely contradicted the very nature of the Son of God. Schneider points out that Athanasius disobeyed out of "love for the Church and for the honor of the Apostolic See" i.e. the papal office and not necessarily the person in that office.

By coincidence, yesterday, in my daily two chapters a day bible reading (one chapter from the OT and one from the NT), I read the account of David's grief at the death of his son, Absalom. (2 Kings 19 or 2 Samuel 18). 

Absalom had revolted against his father, turned the majority of Israel against him, and was set on killing David. David escaped into the wilderness with a few loyalists, including the warrior-general, Joab. David sent Joab to engage and conquer Absalom and his forces but instructed Joab not to kill Absalom. Joab killed him anyway. 

Commentators conclude that Joab disobeyed David because saving the Kingdom was more important than accommodating David's sentimental feelings for his son. In other words, Joab deemed duty to the Kingdom more important than obedience to the king. David was wrong. He had put his personal need over his larger duty to the kingdom. 

Of course, David had famously done the same previously with the neighbor lady (Bathsheba). And by the way, Joab knew this. In fact, it was Joab, who carried out David's order to murder Bathsheba's husband, Uriah. It's just an aside to the main point of this post, but given that experience (killing Uriah to cover for David's adultery), Joab may well have felt license to disobey David when, once again, David put his personal needs before the security of the kingdom.

Joab was eventually killed by Solomon, another of David's sons, but Joab's death was due to his forming an alliance with another brother against Solomon, not his killing of Absalom. 

Here in Guam, those of us who stood up to the then-current "king," the archbishop-abuser-in-chief, were violently criticized for not being "obedient" to the archbishop when we were functionally commanded to "shut up and sit down." 

Imagine what would have happened had we obeyed. 

GENERATIONAL ABUSE: THE REAL REASON FOR THE COVER UP?

We see child abuse within families perpetuated generation after generation, so it should come as no surprise that the same pattern occurs within the church:

"In order to understand the reason behind the failure of Church officials to correct the problem of sexual abuse and their subsequent cover-ups of that abuse, one has to realize that the genesis of the problem lies within the infiltrated structures of the Catholic Church. That is to say, most of the predator priests who abused, raped, and sodomized countless children, the majority of whom were teenage boys, were themselves victims of prior predation."

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