Obama, Notre Dame and the Counter-Syllabus

       The grand moment finally arrived on May 17 when Notre Dame University President Father John Jenkins introduced Obama to the graduates. Barack turned on the charm and won them, hands down.
       Obama, falsely presenting himself as the reasonable man in the middle, called for fair-mindedness. He urged a vigorous debate on the abortion issue, as if there could legitimately be two opposing views to God’s Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. Our Lord clearly said, “He who is not with Me is against Me.” Obama corrects Our Lord, warning Christ not to “reduce differing views to caricature”.
       Obama cast himself as above the fray, counseling contenders on each side how to conduct the discussion with civility. This coming from one of the world's most rabidly pro-abortion (and pro-homosexual) politicians was the height of hubris, hypocrisy and audacity. The graduates, blinded by idol worship and lack of Catholic formation, chanted “Yes We Can! Yes We Can!”. Empty slogans from empty minds.
       Obama spoke the language of the post-Conciliar liberal Catholic: dialogue, common-ground, save the planet, Cardinal Bernardin a “saintly man”, the “golden rule” that runs through religions, and he was applauded by graduates of the premiere bastion of liberal Catholicism. He conformed perfectly to the de-educated monsters who are now the faculty and majority of graduates at Notre Dame.
       Yet perhaps we should not be too censorious of the students, who have been betrayed by their Catholic leaders.
       The scandal at Notre Dame is the effect of the diabolic disorientation of the upper hierarchy now the norm in the Church due to the Second Vatican Council. One cannot praise the Council as the “counter-syllabus” it truly was, and then complain of the disastrous effect that such a reverse necessarily produces.
       This Modernist reverse encompasses the destruction of sound philosophy, the perversion of doctrine and the corruption of moral theology.[1] Anarchy now reigns to the point that the average Catholic university is a destroyer of the Faith rather than its guardian and advocate.
            In 1960, when neo-Modernism was rising to the crescendo that would be the Council, the eminent American theologian Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton warned, “No one has ever been as well placed to harm the true Church and to counteract its essential work as a priest in good standing. If such a man, by his preaching, his teaching, or his writing, actually sets forth the kind of teaching condemned in the anti- Modernist documents Lamentabile sane exitu and Pascendi dominici gregis, or if he works to discredit the loyal defenders of Catholic dogma without receiving any repudiation or reproof from those to whom the apostolic deposit of divine revelation has been entrusted, the Catholic people are in grave danger of being deceived.” [2]
            In the name of the Council’s aggiornamento, which effectively advanced the Modernist principle that a portion of Catholic doctrine can change over time,[3] priests and bishops have propounded teaching condemned by St. Pius X’s anti-Modernist documents, and have discredited loyal defenders of Catholic dogma. These priests and bishops have received no “repudiation or reproof from those to whom the apostolic deposit of divine revelation has been entrusted.”
            The destruction of the Faith has taken place, and continues, by “priests in good standing”.
            Thus, what the clear-sighted Msgr. Fenton predicted in 1960 has come to pass, though he may not have envisioned the massive number now deceived. Obama was enthroned in the once-holy place of Notre Dame because Modernism has been enthroned in the highest echelons of the Church for more than forty years, due to the Second Vatican Council.
            The liberal Cardinal Suenens praised the Council as the “French Revolution of the Church”, and the second generation of that revolution has just graduated from Notre Dame chanting “Yes We Can!” to one of the most anti-Christ leaders on the planet.

Notes:

[1] Quick examples: In the realm of philosophy, Vatican II is the culmination of the movement of the anti-Thomist “New Theology” going on at least since the 1930s, and championed by liberal theologians such as Fathers Rahner, Chenu, Congar, Boulliard von Balthasar, de Lubac, and Ratzinger, all of whom (with the exception of van Balthasar and perhaps Boullliard) were the most influential periti at Vatican II. The proponents of the “New Theology” held that modern philosophical methods more relevant to “modern man” should replace scholasticism/Thomism as the basis of theology. This is reflected in the deliberate absence of scholastic language in the documents of Vatican II, and in the disappearance of scholasticism/Thomism as the backbone of philosophical formation in Catholic seminaries and universities. In the realm of doctrine, Cardinal Ratzinger’s praise of Vatican II as a “counter-syllabus [of Pius IX]” suffices for one of the various examples that could be cited. In the realm of morals, we saw the “equalization of the ends of marriage” that occurred in Paragraph 50 of Guadium et spes, a development lauded by the Protestant Observer Robert McAfee Brown. This part of Guadium et spes gave the impression that the Church no longer teaches the begetting and education of children as the primary end of marriage. This illicit twist is one of the main factors that launched the so-called “birth-control” debate inside the Church, and opened the door for corrupt moral “theologians” – all who continued their careers as “priests in good standing” — to justify all sorts of immoral and deviant sexual behavior, and to teach this “new approach” to college students.

[2] "Sacrorum Antistitum and the Background of the Oath Against Modernism," Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, The American Ecclesiastical Review, October, 1960, p.246.

[3] Shortly after the Council, the anti-Modernist Oath was abolished. Our Church leaders who understood the full nature of Vatican II and its consequences were obviously aware they could not keep to the Council’s new direction, and simultaneously fulfill their solemn Oath before God (in the Oath Against Modernism) to teach the faith “in the same meaning and in the same explanation” as the Church has always held. Yet whether someone takes the Oath Against Modernism or not, Vatican Council I teaches infallibly the duty of the Catholic to hold to Catjholic doctrine “in one and the same doctrine, one in the same sense, and one in the same judgment:” as the Church always taught throughout the centuries. (Dei Filius, Vatican I). It is the nature of objective truth itself.

Posted May 19, 2009
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