The Coded Message Behind Marx’s Resignation: The Discontent of the Super-Modernists.

7 Giugno 2021 Pubblicato da Marco Tosatti

Marco Tosatti

Dear friends and enemies of Stilum Curiae, Americo Mascarucci offers us a very interesting and acute comment about the deeper reasons behind Cardinal Reinhard Marx’s resignation as Archbishop of Munich. It is a sign of discontent – not the first from the most militant wing of current modernism – towards a management that is judged to be too prudent. Happy reading.

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The Coded Message Behind Marx’s Resignation

Two things give us cause for reflection in the resignation of the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the former President of the German Bishops’ Conference. First, the reference to sexual abuse that is said to have occurred “in recent decades” – a clear act of accusation against the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Second, Marx’s statement that “The Church is at a dead end” – which seems to take the form of an explicit criticism of Bergoglio.

Hence, clearly, the question of sexual abuse seems to us be a useful pretext, almost taken for granted, in order to open a new disruptive front of controversy in the Church, after the clamor raised by the protest of German priests who blessed gay couples. Mind you, no one intends to minimize the scandal of abuse and that pedophilia is not a problem, but the fact that Marx connects everything to the need for renewal, which according to him is unable to be attained, sounds decidedly out of tune. The Cardinal assumes responsibility for what is happening in the Church even though he himself is not involved in any case of pedophilia, but he does so as “part of a system.” And that system is nothing other than the Church herself, which according to Marx is profoundly sick and needs to be “refounded.”

The cardinal hopes for a restart, and naturally his goal is to push the Church to reform herself, first of all by accepting the principle of synodality, Marx’s true workhorse. He has been fighting for years to obtain a synod in Germany. The reason is known to everyone, namely, the start of a season of great doctrinal reforms and the revision of the priesthood itself.

Already last year, Marx’s decision not to run for election as head of the German Bishops’ Conference was interpreted by many as a sign of distrust towards Francis, who was accused of not having enough courage to reform the Church. The Synod on the Family did not go as he and the progressive theologian Walter Kasper expected, that is, with a 360-degree opening to the readmission of divorced and remarried couples to Holy Communion, to gay couples, and to civil unions. Likewise, the Synod on the Amazon did not arrive at the hoped-for reform of the priesthood, abolishing celibacy and opening the door to the ordination of women priests. Indeed, the latest reform of canon law contemplates the excommunication of those who ordain women. This is truly too much for those who, like Marx, grew up in the school of Karl Rahner and Hans Kung and thus in the wake of the hermeneutic of discontinuity of the Second Vatican Council. They have seen a good part of their expectations disappointed from the pope they elected and from whom great changes were expected.

Although this pope has made himself the protagonist of great gestures bordering on heresy, he has not satisfied the aspirations of those who, having lived in close contact with the Lutheran world, did not consider it revolutionary enough to have introduced pagan rites into the churches, to have promulgated encyclicals in which it is affirmed that all the divinities are equal, and who has replaced ecological dogmas with Catholic dogmas. It has been too little for those who dream of transforming the Catholic Church into a branch of Lutheranism where gay unions are accepted and blessed and where pastors can always get married.

Between the lines of Marx it is easy to read the following message addressed to Bergoglio: “You are just like what preceded you; you have not achieved anything innovative; the Church is still the same; we trusted you and you betrayed us.”

Personally I believe that the Church really is at a dead end, and in this, as Aurelio Porfiri has explained well, we agree with Marx. But unlike the German cardinal, who since he is no longer archbishop will now have his hands free to carry his battle forward, we are also convinced that the problem is precisely the opposite of the one denounced by the cardinal. There is no need to renew the Church in the sense of a new beginning, but rather, as Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò has long explained, there is a need to return to the truth, rediscovering the Gospel and no longer following the world. That is, bringing the Church back to being not “of the world” but “in the world” with the power of the truth that comes from Christ and from a Gospel that ought to be witnessed to against every effort of cultural homologation and challenging the aligned thought that now seems instead to dominate even the Bishops’ Conferences (see the position of the Italian Bishops’ Conference on the Zan bill). People do not need a Church that serves the world, but rather a Church that saves it. A Church that does not try to adapt herself to modernity and globalist logic in order to gain the consensus of public opinion as if she were a political party, but rather a Church which returns to converting the world, once again affirming that the only Way to follow is Jesus Christ.

The real difference lies here. Marx dreams of a Church that receives the applause of the world, but the true emergency today is exactly the opposite and contrary. Leading the world back to faith by testifying to the Gospel of truth and above all acknowledging once and for all the failure of the Second Vatican Council and its insane demand to embrace modernism. The resignation of Marx wants to force the hand of the pope and convince him to comply with the demands of the Church in Germany, convoking the much-vaunted synod and giving the green light to the progressive agenda of the German bishops. And now it will no longer be possible for Bergoglio to procrastinate. But will he have the same authority as a Paul VI, who in the face of modernist forces defended the truth of the faith, as with Humanae Vitae, opposing them even at the risk of provoking a schism, as in the case of the bankrupt and deleterious Dutch Catechism? If it is true that “A good beginning makes a good ending,” then it becomes obligatory to become pessimistic about Bergoglio’s ability to save the Church.

Americo Mascarucci – journalist and writer