by Julia du Fresne

“I didn’t know Hallmark wrote homilies,” tweets Anthony Stine on X.

He was savaging ‘Pope Leo XIV’ (more accurately, Robert Prevost), for his words to educators yesterday:  “True teachers educate with a smile, and their goal is to awaken smiles in the depths of their students’ souls.”

Ghostwriters in the sky

It does look like Hallmark’s churning out the prosy prose emanating from the Vatican’s conciliar, post-Bergoglian, Novus Ordo Synodal cult.

On the other hand it might come from the purple pen of Cardinal “Heal-me-with-your-mouth” Fernandez, whom the Vatican preposterously deems suited to announce today that the purest of creatures, the Mother of God, is stripped of her historical title of Co-Redemptrix. In his document Mater Populi Fidelis Fernandez states her title to be always ‘inappropriate’.

Fernandez could be ghost-writing for Prevost: the same florid phraseology and bad ecclesiology is evident in the new apostolic exhortation on education, “Drawing New Maps of Hope.” Leo advises embattled parents who long for Catholic clarity for severely secularised, doubting teenagers that “Catholic universities and schools are places where questions are not silenced, and doubt is not banished but rather embraced”. 

Ah, but – in Divini Illius Magistri (1929) Pope Pius XI has stated unequivocally that the Catholic Church “possesses the whole of moral truth”. And popes are divinely mandated to teach that truth. 

Which explains why neither Francis/Bergoglio nor Leo/Prevost has taught that truth. 

Heresy incoming

From Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano (whose stable of impeccable sources rivals that of Ann Barnhardt), comes the first tip-off:

We have received, from one of our sources, a brief but important excerpt from the new document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Mater Populi fidelis: Doctrinal Note on Some Marian Titles Referring to Mary’s Cooperation in the Work of Salvation“, which we are publishing. It will be officially released tomorrow, November 4th.

The following passage in no. 22 seems very clear to us: ” Given the need to explain Mary’s subordinate role to Christ in the work of Redemption, it is always inappropriate to use the title of Co-redemptrix to define Mary’s cooperation.

This title risks obscuring the unique salvific mediation of Christ and, therefore, can generate confusion and imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Christian faith […] When an expression requires numerous and continuous explanations, to avoid it departing from the correct meaning, it does not serve the faith of the People of God and becomes inappropriate. 

The Synodal search for truth

And now to Robert Morrison, writing for The Remnant Newspaper:

In his recent homily to celebrate the “Jubilee of the Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies,” Pope Leo XIV made two statements about truth:

• “No one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together.”
• “Being a synodal Church means recognizing that truth is not possessed, but sought together, allowing ourselves to be guided by a restless heart in love with Love.”
  
  These statements rightly provoked criticism from several Traditional Catholics, such as the following from Matt Gaspers:

“CATHOLICS MOST CERTAINLY DO POSSESS THE WHOLE TRUTH Today, on the traditional Feast of Christ the King (see Quas Primas, nn. 28-29), [the Pope] stated the following during his homily: ‘No one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together. … Being a synodal Church means recognizing that truth is not possessed, but sought together, allowing ourselves to be guided by a restless heart in love with Love.’ 

This is both false and absurd. Our Lord Himself is ‘the Truth’ (John 14:6) and His Church is ‘the pillar and ground of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15). Christ solemnly assures us, ‘If you continue in My word, you shall be My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth: and the truth shall make you free. (John 8:31-32). . . .”

Mr. Gaspers is certainly correct as it relates to matters of faith and morals. One of the clearest statements of this truth comes from Pope Pius XI’s 1929 encyclical on Catholic education, Divini Illius Magistri:

“It is worthy of note how a layman, an excellent writer and at the same time a profound and conscientious thinker, has been able to understand well and express exactly this fundamental Catholic doctrine: The Church does not say that morality belongs purely, in the sense of exclusively, to her; but that it belongs wholly to her. She has never maintained that outside her fold and apart from her teaching, man cannot arrive at any moral truth; she has on the contrary more than once condemned this opinion because it has appeared under more forms than one. She does however say, has said, and will ever say, that because of her institution by Jesus Christ, because of the Holy Ghost sent her in His name by the Father, she alone possesses what she has had immediately from God and can never lose, the whole of moral truth, omnem veritatem, in which all individual moral truths are included, as well those which man may learn by the help of reason, as those which form part of revelation or which may be deduced from it.”

Mary, Co-Redemptrix, Mother of the Church, pray for us

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Julia du Fresne lives in New Zealand and writes at Canto Fermo.

Canto fermo is the term for an existing melody used as the basis for a new composition. The prose and poetry of mystics like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein – all informed by the Gospel – is my ‘melody’. The ‘new composition’ is this blog and my indie novel The Age for Love. To buy my book go to amazon.com or smashwords.com and download to your kindle, iPad, phone or any reading device.