Fatima Perspectives #1325
A most remarkable aspect of the post-Vatican II crisis in the Church is the manner in which her human element has been disoriented, not so much by overt heresies, as by vague notions that have the same effect as heresies because they undermine adherence to doctrine and dogma.
One such notion, unheard-of in the Church before the Council, is “dialogue.” No one has described the infiltration of that pestiferous neologism better than the late great Romano Amerio, a peritus [expert] at Vatican II, who advised the Bishop of Lugano, a member of the Council’s Central Preparatory Commission. To quote Amerio’s masterwork Iota Unum:
“The word was completely unknown and unused in the Church’s teaching before the Council. It does not occur once in any previous Council, or in papal encyclicals, or in sermons, or in pastoral practice. In the Vatican II documents it occurs 28 times, twelve of them in the decree Unitatis Redintegratio. Nonetheless, through its lightning spread and an enormous broadening in meaning, this word, which is very new in the Catholic Church, became the master-word determining post-conciliar thinking, and a catch-all category in the newfangled mentality.
“People not only talk about ecumenical dialogue, dialogue between the Church and the world, ecclesial dialogue, but by an enormous catachresis [abusive overextension of meaning], a dialogical structure is attributed to theology, pedagogy, catechesis, the Trinity, the history of salvation, schools, families, priesthood, sacraments, redemption — and to everything else that has existed in the Church for centuries without the concept being in anybody’s mind or the word occurring in the language.” (Iota Unum, p. 347)
“Dialogue” is one of those verbal “viruses in the Body of Christ” which I have discussed at length here — half-baked concepts that have no clear meaning but merely infect and confuse legitimate concepts, just as non-living viruses infect living cells and thereby weaken the entire body. “Dialogue” has become an all-encompassing ideology that suppresses the Church’s very mission of teaching the world the truths that are necessary for salvation, rather than “dialoguing” endlessly with the proponents of innumerable errors against the Faith.
Now, I can attest that there was a time when the renowned Vaticanist Marco Tosatti avoided any association with Father Gruner because of his “controversial” and supposedly “radical traditionalist” stance against the reign of confusion in the Church caused by such novelties as “dialogue.” Today, however, Tosatti, via his influential blog Stilum Curiae, has taken on a leading role in exposing the errors of the current pontificate. Here we see how Francis has made traditionalists out of many Catholics of the “mainstream” who can no longer abide the course of the post-conciliar ecclesial revolution of which his pontificate is clearly the terminal stage — representing, consequently, a turning point in Church history.
Thus it is Tosatti who has just published a letter from the eminent Monsignor Nicola Bux in which Bux, commenting on the destruction of the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family by a purge of its orthodox members, denounces precisely “the harmful effect of the ideology of dialogue, which is fine as long as you think in the same lines of the one who preaches it.” As Bux rightly observes, “The paradox is that ecumenical and interreligious dialogue is propagated to the outside, while the dictatorship of the single thought within is affirmed.” In other words, “dialogue” is a disguise for a monologue within the Church according to which no dissent from the revolutionary program will be tolerated.
And then this dramatic suggestion from a cleric who would never have spoken this way of any Pope before Francis:
“Perhaps the time is coming when we must stand up and move towards St. Peter, from all over the world, to denounce the new ‘latrocinium ephesinum’ [a latinized reference to the doctrinal guerilla warfare over the person of Christ at the 449 “Robber Council” of Ephesus]…. It seems right to infer that, after the next synod, Jesus Christ will be declared outdated, because it seems that the Amazon and some other ‘European regions’, no longer need Him for salvation, because they are fine as they are.
“Meanwhile, the “moral theology” of marriage and family desired by the Lord; which John Paul II defended and spread at a great personal cost, is declared outdated.
“Therefore, we are at the prodromes [beginning stages] of the Ephesian betrayal. Then, let us follow Benedict XVI who expressed solidarity with the defenestrated [deposed] headmaster [of the Institute], and imagine how annoyed Pope Francis is by all this, despite all his exhortations to pluralism, parresia [frankness of expression] and synodality.”
The crisis in the Church is coming to a head. Of that we can be certain. And, while predictions by non-prophets are perilous, we can reasonably expect a dramatic resolution in the near term. And that will mean an end to the tyranny of “dialogue.”
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