Confession. “Quo vadis?”

[muszę, wbrew mym regułom, umieścić koło siebie (czasowo) parę tekstów Malachi Martina. Bo mamy teraz “Availing Time”, niestety.. md]

I. Confession

, Windswept House p.498

.....Holiness' resignation. Amici di amici. Priends of friends "

            "You must answer my second question as one of my Cardinals and as my confessor. But first, a statement. Monsignore Daniel has told me you have read the two reports I sent over to you. Now, I have more than one reason for contemplating resignation. But my chief reason-the reason that concerns me uppermost at this moment-is the shocking condition into which I have allowed churchmen to lapse during my papacy. My chief reason, then, is that I am no longer effective as Pope. Now, Eminence, the question: What was my main mistake?"

            Sanstefano leaned forward, his forehead resting on one hand. "Un­doubtedly, Holy Father, your failure to interpret the doctrine of the Sec­ond Vatican Council authoritatively and -I repeat, Holiness: and-in agreement with tradition. Beyond any shadow of doubt, the documents of that Council, as they now stand, are not compatible with traditional Ro­man Catholicism. You thus allowed error to flourish without correction. That amounts to misfeasance -possibly even malfeasance -at the papal level. "

            - "Given my motives, are we talking about mortal or venial guilt?"

"Given the damage, mortal!"

            - "Is it your opinion, then, that I should resign?"

"Pontifex maximus a nemini judicatur.  Sanstefano was quoting old Canon Law. "No one is entitled to pass judgment on the Pope. That judgment is yours to make. Yours alone and exclusively."

            -"But I am asking merely your opinion, Eminence. As my confessor."

            Sanstefano's breath felt tight in his chest. "I cannot answer you as con­fessor, Holiness. I have no opinion. No one is competent to have an opin­ion in this matter. No sensible believer would hazard a guess. No one who knows his position would attempt a reply. I have only my faith in Peter' s office. You are the Anointed of God. Who lays his hands on the Anointed will die the death. So Scripture tells us."

            There was little more to say. With grave guilt at issue, both men knew the requirement to repair the damage done and to correct the fault. But both knew, too, that repair and correction added up to a tall order when policies of state and Church were involved.

[....]

            This Cardinal had seen five Popes come and go. Had known them per­sonally before they were elected. Each of them, once he had accepted the papacy, had crossed an invisible line into a place of aloneness. For all the depth and breadth of his human sympathy, the Slavic Pope was no excep­tion.

            "No matter how much we care for him, or he for us," Sanstefano said in his heart, "on our terms and within our world, we cannot fathom his distress and discomfort. We can only give him the truth. Too often, the truth hurts. But it also heals."

 II. “Quo vadis?”

[Malachi Martin, Windswept House, p. 641   md]

            "Holy Father!" If this was to be a farewell speech all gussied up in more talk of signs from Heaven, Gladstone refused to hear it. He held nothing back now. His entire being-mind, nerves, heart and soul -was strung out along the thinnest edge of survival. "Please do not think of yourself as even remotely included in what the Lord said to Peter on that occasion! Nobody has bound your arms. Nobody has forced you to go where you didn't want to go. You have simply acquiesced in the results of a greater cunning than you can muster. It is true that you are the lawful successor to Peter. That you are Peter in that sense. It's true that Peter once took it into his head to leave Rome. No doubt he thought that best for the good of the Church. If he could escape being killed, the Church would benefit. And we all know the story of how Christ Himself met Peter in his headlong flight from Rome along the Via Appia Antica. Met him. Reproached him. Sent him back to his post. And to his death.

            "But please, Holiness. There is no way on the face of God's earth that Your Holiness can compare where you are now to where Peter was that day. This is not the Via Appia Antica, and the men ready to take your place in Peter' s chair are not in the line of men like Linus or Clement or Cletus who took Peter's place. This is an obscure little corner of the world chosen by the enemies of Christ's Church. This is the hole in which men like Maestroianni and Palombo and Aureatini intend to bury you and, with you, the papacy itself as an institution.

            "No, Holy Father! You have allowed yourself to be persuaded that, for the good of the Church, you should accept the renegade judgment of the Council of State. By your own choice, you have allowed yourself to be taken into seclusion. But if you consent any further-[....] -you will complete the abandonment of your post. An abandon­ment of fifteen years' duration."

            "Abandonment, Monsignore?" The Pontiff recoiled. He knew Glad­stone was a man of temper; but no one had ever spoken such harsh word to his face. "Abandonment? And fifteen years of it? Surely not!"

            "Yes, Holy Father. I must insist you listen to me about this!"

"I am listening, Monsignore! How have I abandoned my faithful?"

            "Better than anyone within or outside the Church, you know that every statistic shows that the Catholic Church is going down. Corrupted from within, it is being marginalized, displaced and corroded as a public institu­tion and as a persona l religion. Your Holiness knows that. We have made sure you know. We have filled your ears with audio reports and your eyes with video documents. We have piled your desk high with detailed studies. But even without those reports, you knew. As the best-informed man in Christendom, you knew that the vast majority of your Catholics were being led by the nose away from our sacred Catholic traditions. You knew they were being led into a new form of ersatz Christianity that none of your predecessors could recognize as Catholicism. Not Pope Pius XII. Not Pius XI. Not Pius X. Not Pius IX. None of them.

            "Yet, what have you done to arrest that deterioration, Holiness? You speak of your search for unity. But you have abandoned your seminarians to heretical teachers. You have abandoned your parish faithful to dissi­dent, yes, to immoral bishops and Cardinals. You have abandoned your schoolchildren to a non-Catholic system and your nuns to a destroying wave of secularizing feminists. You protected none of them. Not even our sacred buildings themselves. You have allowed our very churches and chapels to be denuded of Altar and Tabernacle, of Confessional and Statue. In all of that, you have acquiesced continually. And now you are on the brink of acquiescing in the liquidation of your own pontificate."

            Gladstone stopped as abruptly as he had begun. What was the use? He could feel the Pontiff receding into the inner sanctum of his own mind. His words were like dead stones falling on tin; so much sound, and no more.

            In the silence that fell between them, the Pontiff's face flushed with color. It wasn't anger he felt, but a deeper emotion only he had known. A terrible consciousness. A sense of standing completely alone. Behind him was the whole people of God for whom he, as Pope, was the Almighty's sole earthly representative. In front of him, the abyss of God's immeasur­able being and infinite power.

            "Just a simple sign of God's intention." The words came haltingly, gently from the Pontiff's lips. "All along I have waited for a sign of God's holy will."

            The effect on Gladstone was devastating. He was staring at failure; and the reality of the situation struck him so cruelly that his face went white. In those two sentences, the Pope had given a summary of his attitude. He had spelled out the rule by which he was judging his present situation, Christian's words, his own next moves.

            Chris felt a desperate need to call out for divine help; a desire to pray that was painful in its intensity. The pressure that had been mounting for days threatened to go over the edge of his control into helpless despair. Was this to be the sum total of his achievement? To hear his Pope, the most divinely empowered human individual alive, hold back timorously? In a concrete situation in which the safety and integrity of Christ's Church was at stake, could he elicit no more than a querulous, insistent plea for a sign? Had he come this far only to be witness to a Pope-the man who should be the very pillar of Roman Catholicism's willingness to take on the entire world-reduced to the condition of a hesitant septuagenarian looking for a bargain with the Almighty?         .

            His own resolve almost broken, Chris fought against his emotions. He searched the Pontiff's face with his eyes. He noted all the devastations of time's onrush, the unrelenting depredations of age. Once upon a recent time, he thought, this man had been a rampant lion let loose by provi­dence on the USSR; and he had ravaged that colossus into disintegration.

            And then, as suddenly as thunder, Chris understood. Compassion, the firstborn of genuine love, poured fresh insight into his soul: widely known of twentieth-century Popes. Insight into much more than his undoubted moral virtue and his uncanny geopolitical foresight.  Insight  into his peculiar destiny. Insight, above all, into his fatal weakness.

            This Pontiff had won his great victory over Soviet Marxism. And he had enabled millions already born and millions more yet unborn to escape the cruelest tyranny so far realized by evil hearts. But he had achieved that victory in the name of human solidarity. And once he had done that­ once this Pope had acted successfully in the name of human solidarity as the indestructible cement of human fraternity; of human identity as a family-he and his papacy had been co-opted into the building of that solidarity. Thus, the essential mission of the Catholic Church had been mongrelized. For, in sacred principle, Pope and papacy are not supposed to act as surrogates for human solidarity, but for the kingdom and the regime of Jesus of Nazareth as Lord of human history. Nevertheless, he as Pope, and his administration as the papacy, were aligned with a purely human goal.

            In the empathy of his humanitarian feeling, he never explicitly spoke of that Jesus of Nazareth as the King of nations, but of the solidarity he hoped would be fostered through transnational organizations. He didn't consistently present himself in globalist meetings of the nations as the all­ important Vicar of that Jesus. His favorite description of himself was something as disarming -as anodyne -as "I, a son of humanity and Bishop of Rome." Nor did he inculcate the truth of Roman Catholicism as the explicit will of Jesus, but rather as ethical rules; as conditions deduced by human reason for safeguarding the solidarity of the human family.

            Still, to say that the Slavic Pope had been co-opted by circumstances was not to say that he did not act on his own choice. On the contrary. Nobody could deny this man's belief in the divine person and role of Jesus of Nazareth and Calvary. No one could cast suspicion on his personal integrity or doubt his innate piety. But it was by choice that he spoke in the language of his contemporaries, not in the well-known accents of Ro­man Pontiffs, stating that which is true about God. It was by choice that he removed Catholicism's icons from its sacred buildings-removed even the Body and Blood of Christ-in an effort to accommodate alien religious minds and the pagan rites of nonbelievers. It was by choice that he had relegated the panoply of his Catholicism to the background. By choice, he had frequented too much the company of non-Catholic prelates who never shared his Catholic faith, and of un-Catholic theologians who were devoid of Catholic piety.

            Now, in the evening of his papacy, it was no longer easy for him to reach beyond the limits of human solidarity to proclaim the ancient mes­sage of the traditional papacy. It no longer seemed to occur to him to wield his papacy as a weapon. Hence, the facility with which he could consider resignation and retirement in the face of cunning he could not measure.

            That whole tide of understanding rushed in on Gladstone in a matter of seconds. He knew now where this enigmatic Pope stood. And he knew there were only two possible means of turning him around. To persuade him to go back to Rome, if only for the time it would take to undo the enthronement, it would have to be urged on him as a basic duty to that human solidarity he had so signally vindicated, and of which he was now a prisoner. And it would have to be urged on him as a direct consequence of his particularly fervent devotion to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, to whom he had dedicated his pontificate.

            "Holiness." Gladstone gathered his courage again. "Holiness, we have no need to request a miraculous sign-Christ appearing in all His glory to you or the sun dancing again in the skies. In a certain true sense, Your Holiness doesn't deserve that. But, more to the point right now, Your Holiness doesn't need that. We are not dealing with the Apocalyptic. Not yet! A minute ago, I mentioned the Virgin's description of you as 'the last Pope of these Catholic times.' If you accept that as authentically Mary's statement-and especially if you see it in the context of the men in Rome who would be Pope-are you not the last one capable of cleansing the Holy Basilica and the Vatican of any trace of Lucifer's enthronement?

            "You have insisted that, from the beginning of our salvation by Our Lord Jesus, God has decided to deal with the world through His Blessed Mother. Again and again you have said that you yourself were chosen by God as Pope to be the special servant of His Mother. If you still claim total devotion to her, is it not your duty to trample on that most ancient enemy of the human race? It cannot be, then, Holy Father, that you will turn your back. That you will refuse to exercise the unique power Christ gave you. That you will shilly-shally away from your destiny as the last Pope of these Catholic times. That you will leave Lucifer and his in-house Curial agents free to wreak their blasphemous filth on Altar and Taberna­cle and priesthood and papacy.

            "Resign if you will, Holiness. But not yet! For the fate of your own soul, you cannot leave us naked and unprotected to face that Fallen Archangel who, in Peter's very words, seeks to devour us all like a ravenous lion. You cannot think that you can leave us in this lurch of evil. You cannot walk away from this papacy knowing you have left that supreme enemy in charge."

            Christian had no more to say, no more to give.