“I signed the Filial Appeal to Pope Francis on the future of the family, because to whom else could believers alarmed by the fire of heresy turn, if not to the supreme head of the Church visible constituted by Jesus Christ?” asks Professor Jacek Bartyzel, a theatrologist and political scientist in an interview with PCh24.pl.
Why did you decide to sign the Filial Appeal to Pope Francis on the future of the family, in the context of the upcoming second session of the Synod?
Wesprzyj nas już teraz!
When a house is catching fire, the household members fill buckets with water and run to put out the fire. When an enemy attacks the boundaries of the fatherland, the children form battalions to repel the invasion. So when our biggest house and highest fatherland, the Vineyard of the Lord, is being devoured by the fire of heresy and those appointed in the first place to combat heresy give in to it, the duty of every conscious Catholic is to run to save the unstable orthodoxy.
The Filial Appeal reads, inter alia, about the events from the first session of the Synod. “For millions of faithful Catholics, the beacon seems to have dimmed in face of the onslaught of lifestyles spread by anti-Christian lobbies.” What kind of lobby may it be and what might its victory threaten with?
It is difficult to give a precise and clear answer. It is reflected in the fact that the petitioners used the term found in the colloquial, „universal” language, not the ecclesiastical language, as well as the use of the term with a loose meaning, pointing to the so-called pressure groups that influence (or at least try to do so) the decisions made by politicians.
First association is that pontifical teaching tends to meet the prevailing opinions of the “world”, especially those that have already reached the status of “public orthodoxy.” This trend is not new at all, because in certain Catholic circles, in both clergy and laity, it appeared after the French Revolution and was known as liberal Catholicism in the 19th century or usually (though not exclusively) as Christian democracy in the 20th century. To put it briefly, that meant postulating the rapprochement or even reconciliation between the Church and the so-called modern civilization, based on liberal “values,” which were sometimes regarded as an (even unconscious) evangelical and Christian inspiration.
However, there is also quite a serious difference between the historical (and repeatedly condemned by the Magisterium) Catholic liberal or Christian democratic trends and the current situation. Then Liberal Catholics and Christian Democrats derived from the principles of faith, morals and teaching of the Church in their “opening up to the world”, sinning only (except single cases of entering the path of apostasy like Lammenais and some later modernists) with the excessive and unjustified optimism that a liberal revolution could be “baptized” in the same way as the ancient and medieval missionaries baptized pagans and “barbarians.” Similarly to probably the most distinguished of them, Jacques Maritain, they deceived themselves by thinking that Catholics’ accepting hyper-abstemious standards of behavior in a secularized world not as Christians, but only like Christians, i.e. being a luminous example of the virtues to an almost heroic extent, would both shame and morally build lay neighbors that it would result in an explosion of an even grander than medieval “new Christian civilization” (nouvelle chrétienté). An obvious failure of this “strategy of evangelization” does not deny the fact that they tried to serve Christ and the Church, but they did it unskillfully and often extremely recklessly.
And what is the situation like now?
Today we are faced with exactly the opposite activity. It is no longer about “Catholization of liberalism” or “Christianization of the revolution,” but the opposite: the aim is to revolutionize the Church and liberalize the Catholic doctrine. In fact, this has already been done in regard to the social teaching with the silent rejection of the idea of the Christian state and the proclamation of “religious freedom” in the documents of Vaticanum II. Ecclesiology has also been greatly weakened by “collegiality” that is analogous to political “democratization.” Currently, the revolutionary trend began to attack and devour the last bastion, also defended by the “post-Council” popes, i.e. moral teaching and even its pre-theological, natural law foundation.
The horror of the current situation is that it is not naive “Christianizers of the revolution” that clumsily attempt to infiltrate the “world,” but the purple agents of the revolution, holding the highest positions in the Roman Curia and the local episcopal conferences, have infiltrated the Church. To paraphrase late Jean Madiran, who at the time of the Second Vatican Council had already explicitly written that “the heresy of the 20th century” is a heresy of progressive bishops. When listening to the scandalous statements of hierarchs such as cardinals Kasper and Marx, we can conclude that the heresy of the 21st century is the heresy of cardinals.
And here we come to a deeper level of understanding of the concept of lobbies, used in the Filial Appeal. What are they? If they promote an openly anti-Christian style, it cannot only be about some “business,” as in the case of lobbies working in the field of politics, especially where politics meets business. This is the realm of the dark in both meanings of the word: the common meaning, signaling something hidden from the eyes of “ordinary people,” but which existence they suspect because of the effects; and the metaphysical meaning of something that comes from the spiritual depths of the darkness forces, seeking to destroy the only means which God ordained for the salvation of man, the Church. Of course, we know that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” but they will not stop storming the gates of the Church until the end.
Lobbies, referred to in the Appeal, are simply those officials who betrayed Christ and His Church like Judas and they become the servants and contractors of Satan’s plans.
Why should we sign the Filial Appeal? How would you encourage the Catholics lost in the information chaos in the media?
When “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” with such a power (2 Thessalonians 2:7), to whom else could alarmed believers turn, if not to – as we want to believe – the supreme head of the Church visible constituted by Jesus Christ? If also this call turned out to be futile, it would mean that „the one who restrains” the lawless, has already stepped down and moved from the katechon eon to the eschatological eon, beginning with the “abomination of desolation.”
