Fatima Perspectives #1334
Sandro Magister reports on the alarming, but at this point hardly unexpected, news of a video of one Father Giovanni Nicolini, a priest of the Diocese of Bologna and “among those closest to Jorge Mario Bergoglio,” who claims “that in the Amazon the celebration of the Mass by married deacons is already a de facto reality, authorized by the local bishops. And Pope Francis, informed of the matter, is alleged to have said: ‘Go ahead!’”
Nicolini, Magister stresses, “is not just anybody.” He is one of the most prominent priests in the key Archdiocese of Bologna, whose archbishop, Matteo Zuppi, was made a cardinal “only a few days ago” by Francis. Nicolini is a disciple and “spiritual son” of Giuseppe Dossetti (1913-1996), the famous (in Italy) politician-turned-priest and monk who, not surprisingly, was one of the movers and shakers at Vatican II.
Nicolini heads the “Family of the Visitation” community made up of “thirty monks and nuns and as many married couples…” and is also a member of the ultra-progressive “school of Bologna,” founded by Dossetti. The adherents of this “school” include the “Church historian” (read: revisionist) Alberto Melloni, who condemned the four “dubia cardinals” because of the public reservations about the disastrous Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, and Enzo Bianchi, head of the fake “ecumenical monastery” at Bose whose “monks” include Protestants. Back in 1967, when some degree of sanity still prevailed in the “Church of Vatican II,” “the Bishop of Biella issued an interdict for the presence of non-Catholics in the community, but the following year it was removed thanks to the intercession of Michele Cardinal Pellegrino,” another Vatican II mucky-muck. Both Melloni and Bianchi, along with Nicolini, are, as Magister notes, “ultra-Bergoglians.”
In the cited video, to audible gasps and at least one snicker from the audience, Nicolini declares that “the Church of priests [is] coming to an end.” To which someone replied: “Is that a prophecy?” No, said Nicolini, “it’s already a reality.” Nicolini went on to say (further translation provided by Magister) that “the Church of priests is coming to an end” because there are no vocations for the supposedly vigorous and renewed “Church of Vatican II.” As Nicolini explained:
“We are now reaching the height of folly, every priest is taking care of six parishes, but this is how it ends. This crisis of the priesthood in any case will increase relentlessly, until serious consideration is finally given to the suitability of abolishing the celibacy of priests. As long as this celibacy of priests remains, the decline is unstoppable…”
As liberals of all stripes always do, Nicolini argues that unless we accommodate a given evil — in this case the abolition of priestly celibacy, a tradition of apostolic origin — another evil will ensue: i.e., that priests will have sexual relations anyway. Says he: “But it is clear that when I find out that a thirty-year-old priest who comes to me for confession, now they are putting him in a big rural area by himself, in six months he has a mistress. And so now this decline will be very rapid.”
Is this just hypothetical or has Nicolini violated the seal of confession? In either case, the sophistry is the same: We must let priests marry or else they will fornicate. And what kind of priest would fornicate if he is not allowed to marry? Why, a priest of the “Church of Vatican II.” Of which there is a very small and rapidly dwindling number. Indeed, Nicolini cites the very failure of the “Church of Vatican II” to attract vocations as justification for abolishing the celibate priesthood: “[I]n 2030 Bologna will have 30 priests. Right now there are 450, and that’s already a big decline. And so this structure of the Church will no longer be there.”
Here, yet again, the incompetent physician prescribes the cure for the patient he himself is killing. Having destroyed priestly vocations, the relentless ideologues of Vatican II now call for the abolition of the priesthood as the Church has always known it.
And then the clincher. According to Nicolini, Francis explicitly approved of the practice in the Amazon of married deacons “saying Mass.” As Nicolini recounts:
“In the Amazon one evening, from an isolated mission parish in the Amazon they made a phone call, it was an old deacon, in his sixties, married, who said to his bishop: ‘I have to tell you that tomorrow there won’t be any Mass, because there is no priest.’ And the bishop told him: ‘You go there and say Mass.’ A married deacon, children already raised, the ‘elders’ are called, and the bishops there have given him authorization to preside over the liturgy. They told the pope about this and the pope said: ‘For now we cannot write anything, you go ahead!’ I wondered, when I found out that he was convening the worldwide meeting of bishops for the Amazon, who knows if perhaps he can or wants to say something. But the Church, in its concrete juridical structure, as it exists now, is at an end.”
Magister wants to know, as do we, “Is it true or false, what he says about the ‘Masses’ already being celebrated in the Amazon by married deacons? And is it true or false that Francis gave the go-ahead?” I think we already know the answers to those questions. And the answers will be confirmed by the Vatican’s resounding silence in the face of what Magister has published.
Behold the Modernists bringing an end to their own work of destruction by leveling whatever remains of what they have destroyed. But after their work of destruction is done, the Church of all time will emerge ever more clearly into view. Plentiful vocations to the celibate priesthood in the traditional orders and communities will carry on the faith of our fathers, abiding that time when, through the intercession of the Mother of God, the rotted branch of Modernism is cut away from the visible structure of the Church and what remains intact in some places will return everywhere.
Francis evidently believes he has the right to pursue a megalomaniacal “dream” of “transforming everything so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.” But he will learn, his Modernist collaborators will learn, and the world will learn that the Church is no mere human kingdom ruled by an earthly monarch, but the Mystical Body of Christ, whose will is not governed by the vain imaginings of deluded Modernist visionaries.
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