“A civil war is in progress in the [Roman Catholic] Church”

“A civil war is in progress in the Church”:

“A civil war is in progress in the Church” .... The conflict was opened, consciously or not, by Pope Francis himself, most of all after the Exhortation Amoris laetitia, and today the Church is not advancing but sinking, into a ground furrowed by crevices and deep divisions.

Someone compared the failure of Pope Francis’ pontificate to that of Barack Hussein Obama. What Washington took eight years to accomplish has now happened in Rome after 3 years: the passage from the euphoria of the first hour to the final depression, having totally missed the targets that had been pre-established. Yet, it would be a mistake to read Pope Francis’ pontificate in purely political terms. Pope Francis would never have been able to pronounce Obama’s “Yes, we can”. For a Pope, unlike a politician, not everything is possible. The Supreme Pontiff has supreme power, full and immediate over the entire Church, but cannot change the Divine Law that Jesus Christ gave to His Church, nor the natural law that God has impressed in the heart of every man. He is the Vicar of Christ, but not his successor.

The Pope cannot change Holy Scripture, nor Tradition, which are the remote rule of faith in the Church, but must submit to them. It is this the impasse that Pope Bergoglio is faced with today. The “dubia” presented by the four cardinals (Brandmüller, Burke, Caffarra e Meisner) to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have placed him in a blind alley. Confronted with the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, the cardinals are asking the pope to respond clearly, with a yes or no, to the following question: Can the divorced and remarried civilly who don’t want to abandon the objective state of sin they find themselves in, legitimately receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist? And more in general: is the Divine and natural law still absolute, or in some cases, does it tolerate exceptions?

The answer concerns the fundamentals of morals and the Catholic faith. If what was valid yesterday is not today, what is valid today might not be tomorrow. But if it is admitted that morality can change, according to the times and circumstances, the Church is destined to be submerged in the relativism of the liquid society of our times. If this is not so, Cardinal Vallini, needs to be removed, for in his report given at the pastoral congress of the diocese of Rome on November 19th, he affirmed that the divorced and remarried can be admitted to Communion, according to a “discernment that adequately distinguishes case by case”. His position was made proper on December 2nd by the daily “Avvenire”, the Italian Bishops’ Conference body, according to which, those [words] in Amoris laetitia, were “very clear words to which the Pope gave his imprimatur.” Yet, can a pope ascribe to the “discernment” of pastors the faculty of breaking the Divine and natural law of which the Church is the guardian?

If a Pope tries to change the faith of the Church, he renounces in an explicit or implicit manner his mandate as Vicar of Christ and, sooner or later, will be obliged to renounce his pontificate. The hypothesis of a dramatic turn events of this kind in the course of 2017 is not to be excluded. The choice of voluntary abdication would allow Pope Francis to abandon the field as a misunderstood reformer, charging the rigidity of the Curia with the responsibility of his failure. If this should happen it is more probable that it will occur after the next Consistory, which will allow Pope Bergoglio to introduce into the Sacred College a new group of cardinals close to him, in order to condition the choice of his successor. The other hypothesis is that of fraternal correction on the part of the cardinals, which, once made public, would be tantamount to an ascertainment of errors or heresies.