Infiltration
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In 1983, John Paul II changed the Code of Canon Law. The new Code conformed to Vatican II and was laxer. One crucial example is the change in specificity and penalties for sexually immoral priests — a problem that would haunt his papacy later. Compare the 1917 Code with the 1983 Code regarding sexually immoral priests. Here is the canon law punishing clergy from 1917:
All clerics found to have committed any delict against the Sixth Commandment with a minor below the age of sixteen, or engaged in adultery, debauchery, bestiality, sodomy, pandering, or incest, they are suspended, publicly declared as having committed sexual misconduct, and deprived of any office, pension, dignity, and function if they have any, and in graver cases, dismissed from the clerical state. (Canon 2359 § 2, 1917 Code)
Notice that the sexual sins are clearly described and distinguished. Moreover, the penalties are clear: loss of office, pension (money), dignity, and function, and, in some cases dismissal, from the clerical state.
Now compare the canon from 1917 with the abysmally weak revision made by Pope John Paul II in the Code of Canon Law of 1983:
Can. 1395 §1. A cleric who lives in concubinage, other than the case mentioned in can. 1394, and a cleric who persists with scandal in another external sin against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue is to be punished by a suspension. If he persists in the delict after a warning, other penalties can gradually be added, including dismissal from the clerical state.
§2. A cleric who in another way has committed an offense against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue, if the delict was committed by force or threats or publicly or with a minor below the age of sixteen years, is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants.
The revised version by John Paul II states that clergy in “external sin” against the sixth commandment are to be suspended. If they persist after warning, “penalties can gradually be added, including dismissal from the clerical state,” but these penalties are not prescribed. This means that a bishop could have a harsh talk with them or send them to a sex rehab center. He can transfer them to a different assignment. Contrast this with 1917, which states explicitly and clearly that they are to be “suspended, publicly declared as having committed sexual misconduct, and deprived of any office, pension, dignity.”
The canon of 1983 also does not identify specific sexual sins — only one against a minor below the age of sixteen. The 1917 Code is far superior in that it explicitly lists the sins worthy of punishment committed by clergy:
sex with a minor below the age of sixteen
adultery
debauchery
bestiality
sodomy
pandering
incest
Why did the Code of Canon Law under John Paul II remove the language of “adultery,” bestiality,” and “sodomy” from clerical punishment? Under the 1917 Code, Theodore McCarrick would have been censured for homosexual sodomy. But under the 1983 Code, there is no longer a specified crime of homosexual sodomy. Canonically, sexually immoral clerics such as McCarrick get a free pass on that sin.
The scandalous Judas priest Father Marcial Maciel abused the same canonical loophole. Father Maciel was a Mexican priest and founder of the celebrated Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi movement. Like McCarrick, he was an extraordinary fund-raiser and recruiter of handsome seminarians.
His life and movement were built of straw. It became public that Father Maciel had sexually abused countless seminarians, young men, and boys. He had secret residences and maintained sexual relations with at least two women, one of whom was a minor. He fathered as many as six children and allegedly abused two of these children as well.127 He was a morphine addict, and his written works contained overt plagiarism. Maciel was also able to walk between the raindrops through bribes given to Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, beloved friend and counselor of John Paul II. Yet even after Maciel was internally exposed, the nondescript canon law of 1983 prevented him from being censured for the precise crime of sodomy as indicated in the 1917 Code.
This is a glaring deficiency in the updated Code of John Paul II. Why make the law less specific and laxer? This is a rhetorical question, because there is no possible reason to relax the law of the Church and make it less precise. Is there any doubt that the Catholic Church largely ceased disciplining her sexually aberrant priests and bishops in the 1980s and 1990s?
The 1983 Code of Canon Law introduced the rule that Catholic clergy may administer Penance, Anointing of the Sick, and Holy Communion to Christians in danger of death but not in full communion with the Catholic Church, “provided that they manifest Catholic faith in respect to these sacraments and are properly disposed” (Canon 844 §4). The new Code also reversed the two ends of matrimony: (1) the procreation and education of children and (2) the mutual good of the spouses (Canon 1055).
The 1983 Code introduced the canonical authority of the “conference of bishops” over a nation with quasi-jurisdiction over the dioceses therein:
A conference of bishops, a permanent institution, is a group of bishops of some nation or certain territory who jointly exercise certain pastoral functions for the Christian faithful of their territory in order to promote the greater good which the Church offers to humanity, especially through forms and programs of the apostolate fittingly adapted to the circumstances of time and place, according to the norm of law. (Canon 447)
Also in 1983, John Paul II changed the process for canonizing saints. Previously, a Catholic being considered for sainthood had to display heroic virtue that was examined and contested by a “devil’s advocate,” who was tasked with finding all the dirt on the person in question. John Paul II abolished the devil’s advocate. The entire process was transformed from a legal investigation into a theological study, in which the candidate’s writings were examined. So, the emphasis for sainthood was shifted from the person’s historical acts to his personal beliefs.
The years 1983 to 1986 marked the beginning of John Paul II’s advanced ecumenism. By the end of 1983, John Paul II had become the first pope to preach inside a Lutheran church in Rome. In February 1984, he oversaw the new revision of the Lateran Treaty, which abolished the condition that “the Roman and Apostolic Catholic religion is the only religion of the State.” In May 1984, John Paul II sent “particular greetings to the members of the Buddhist tradition who are preparing to celebrate the feast of the coming of the Lord Buddha.”128 Days later, he visited a Buddhist temple in Thailand, removed his papal shoes, and sat down before an altar on which stood a large idol of Buddha. In June of that year, the pope visited Geneva, where he participated in an ecumenical “liturgy of the word” with Protestants and affirmed that “the Catholic Church’s involvement in the ecumenical movement is irreversible.”129 In 1985, he participated in an animist rite in Togo. In February 1986, he received the sacred ashes of the Hindu religion. In August of that year, he would be received by a synagogue in Rome.
On 28 October 1986, John Paul II invoked and hosted the Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace. In 1895, Pope Leo XIII had condemned a “Congress of Religions” held in Chicago. But less than a century later, the pope of Rome was organizing and celebrating such an event. Pope John Paul II and his cardinals invited representatives from thirty-two world religions, including Muslim imams, Jewish rabbis, Buddhists, Sikhs, Bahais, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Native American chiefs, and African shamans, to pray with them for peace. This was the first time a pope prayed with members of other religions and sat with them on equal standing. Most scandalous of all was that the Tibetan Buddhist delegation led by the Dali Lama were allowed to place an idol of Buddha on top of a Catholic tabernacle in the Chapel of San Pietro, as reported by the New York Times.130 To this idol they burned incense within a Catholic church with permission from the pope.
By an act of Christ Our Lord on 26 September 1997, the ceiling of that very chapel collapsed and destroyed the altar and the chapel where this sacrilege had occurred eleven
years before.
At the meeting, Pope John Paul II appealed to their deeper level of humanity: “If there are many and important differences among us, is it not true to say that at the deeper level of humanity, there is a common ground whence to operate together in a solution of this dramatic challenge of our age: true peace or catastrophic war?” In the closing ceremony, two American Indians of the Crow tribe, John and Burton Pretty on Top, stood before the pope in their plumed headdresses and lit up their peace pipe, and “the crowd responded with a great clicking of pocket cameras and then applause.”131
Two bishops violently objected to Pope John Paul II’s participation in the 1986 Assisi meeting. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer publicly protested:
Public sin against the unicity of God, the Word Incarnate, and His Church makes one shudder with horror: John Paul has encouraged false religions to pray to their false gods: it is unprecedented and immeasurable scandal, . . . an inconceivably impious and intolerable humiliation to those who remain Catholic, loyally professing the same Faith for twenty centuries.132
For Archbishop Lefebvre and his priests in the Society of Saint Pius X, the Assisi 1986 meeting was a bridge too far. Lefebvre was now eighty-one years old and growing frail. Concerned over apostasy in the Church and even committed by the pope, Lefebvre began to make plans to appoint his successors. Despite his disappointment over John Paul II’s participating in and encouraging pagan idolatry in a Catholic basilica, he did not fall into sedevacantism. He fully recognized the authority of John Paul II as pope, but he doubted the orthodoxy and leadership of the pope.
Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Lefebvre reached an agreement in May 1988 that would allow Lefebvre to consecrate one bishop for the continuation of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). The agreement was brokered between Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Archbishop Lefebvre and approved by Pope John Paul II with the following terms:
All censures against Lefebvre and the clergy and laity within SSPX would be removed.
The SSPX would be recognized as a clerical society of apostolic life of pontifical right.
The Holy See had agreed to consecrate a bishop recommended by Lefebvre for the SSPX as soon as 15 August 1988.
On 24 May, Lefebvre asked Cardinal Ratzinger for three bishops, instead of just one, and asked that a majority of traditionalists be represented on the commission overseeing the society, rather than two of the five, as outlined in the agreement.133 Through Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II declined the revision to the proposal. The following morning, Lefebvre called together some clergy and explained, “I am inclined to consecrate four bishops anyway on June 30. My age and my failing health urge me, before the good Lord calls me to Him, to assure the safeguarding, not of ‘my work,’ but of this modest venture to restore the priesthood and preserve the Catholic Faith. I can do this giving the episcopacy to bishops who are free to make the Faith live in a setting that is entirely cut off from modern errors.”134
That same day Lefebvre learned that Ratzinger rejected all the candidates that Lefebvre had put forward for consideration as bishops for the SSPX. In a letter to Pope John Paul II, dated 2 June 1988, the feast of Corpus Christi, Lefebvre explained that he would move forward and consecrate bishops even though they had not been pre-approved by Pope John Paul II.135 One week later, John Paul II wrote Lefebvre, warning him that this would be a schismatic act.
Archbishop Lefebvre and his priests and religious appealed to a state of ecclesial emergency in light of scandals from 1970 to 1988: the papally sanctioned idolatry at Assisi in 1986, the new Code of Canon Law of 1983, the new process of 1983 for canonizing saints, the apparent abrogation of the Tridentine Latin Mass, the new liturgies for all seven sacraments, the new ecumenism, and the heretical formation in most seminaries. Lefebvre invoked the Code of Canon Law stating, “the salvation of souls must always be the supreme law in the Church.”136 Convinced that he was operating for the salvation of souls, Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four of his priests as bishops at the SSPX seminary at Écône, Switzerland, on 30 June 1988. The next day, Bernardin Cardinal Gantin of the Congregation of Bishops affirmed Lefebvre’s automatic excommunication:
Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, Archbishop-Bishop Emeritus of Tulle, notwithstanding the formal canonical warning of 17 June last and the repeated appeals to desist from his intention, has performed a schismatic act by the episcopal consecration of four priests, without pontifical mandate and contrary to the will of the Supreme Pontiff, and has therefore incurred the penalty envisaged by Canon 1364, paragraph 1, and canon 1382 of the Code of Canon Law. . . . Having taken account of all the juridical effects, I declare that the above-mentioned Archbishop Lefebvre, and Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson, and Alfonso de Galarreta have incurred ipso facto excommunication latae sententiae reserved to the Apostolic See.
In the papal motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, dated 2 July 1988, Pope John Paul II confirmed Lefebvre’s excommunication for having consecrated bishops despite the pope’s admonition not to do so. Lefebvre would die three years later on the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March 1991, at age eighty-five in Martigny, Switzerland. Archbishop Lefebvre’s excommunication was the only excommunication of a bishop that Pope John Paul II recognized formally during his pontificate.
The pontificate of John Paul II continued into the 1990s with his apostolic constitution Fidei depositum, which ordered the publication of a new catechism that would include the reforms of Vatican II. Originally published in French in 1992, the Catechism of the Catholic Church became available in English in 1994. The official Latin edition was not published until 1997. It was enthusiastically received by conservatives who desperately sought a flotation device for orthodoxy after the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. In 1993, John Paul II issued his controversial encyclical Veritatis splendor, which upheld the intrinsic evil of acts such as abortion and contraception.
Leading up to the Jubilee Year 2000, John Paul II began issuing apologies — numbering more than one hundred — to the world on behalf of the Catholic Church. These included apologies for the persecution of Galileo, the African slave trade, burning heretics at the stake, the religious wars following the Protestant Reformation, the denigration of women and their rights, and the silence of Catholics during the Holocaust. These apologies were controversial because they implicated guilt on the part of the Catholic Church and not merely on the misled sinful Catholics who had committed these misdeeds.
Prior to the Jubilee Year, Pope John Paul II scandalized the world when a photo surfaced of him kissing the Koran on 14 May 1999. He was visited by a delegation composed of the Shiite imams of Khadum mosque and the Sunni president of the council of administration of the Iraqi Islamic Bank and a representative of the Iraqi ministry of religion. The Catholic patriarch of Babylon Raphael Bidawid was present for the meeting and told the Vatican’s own FIDES News Service what had transpired at this photographed meeting: “At the end of the audience the Pope bowed to the Muslim holy book the Koran, which was presented to him by the delegation and he kissed it as a sign of respect.”137 The Koran explicitly states that Jesus Christ is not the Son of God and that the Trinity is a false doctrine. How a pope of the Catholic Church could kiss the scriptures of Islam is unimaginable.
Flanked by representatives of Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism, Pope John Paul II opened the Jubilee Year 2000. One year later, he would be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and begin his slow, painful descent in health.
Whether one admires John Paul II or not, he was certainly not an infiltrator of the Church. His pontificate is clearly conflicted, and he seems to be the first pope truly formed by the Second Vatican Council. Recall that the Alta Vendita never mandated placing an open Freemasonic atheist in the Chair of Peter. Rather, the Freemasons sought to create (beginning in the mid-1800s) a climate among youth, seminarians, and young priests who grew up breathing the air of ecumenism, indifference to religious disagreements, and a mission for world brotherhood
.
John Paul II is the first pope who moved freely in these ideals while still maintaining his old-world Polish devotions for Eucharistic Adoration, the Rosary, Confession, and processions. As a theologian and a youthful bishop, he drank deeply of Vatican II, but he still retained the piety of a Catholic. To ensure that the next pope would not possess these impediments to progress, certain liberal cardinals began to assemble and plan for the next pope.
126 “A Foreign Pope,” Time, 30 October 1978, 1.
127 Emilio Godoy, “Pope Rewrites Epitaph for Legion of Christ Founder,” IPS News: 3 May 2010.
128 L’Osservatore Romano, 7–8 May 1984, Documentation Catholique, 1878: 619, 4.
129 L’Osservatore Romano, 12 June 1984, Documentation Catholique, 1878: 704.
130 Roberto Suro, “12 Faiths Join Pope to Pray for Peace,” New York Times, 28 October 1986.
131 Ibid.
132 Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2002), 537.
133 Ibid., 556.
134 Ibid., 557–558.
135 Ibid., 560.
136 Canon (1983) 1752: “In cases of transfer the prescripts of can. 1747 are to be applied, canonical equity is to be observed, and the salvation of souls, which must always be the supreme law in the Church, is to be kept before one’s eyes.”
137 FIDES News Service, 14 May 1999.
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Sankt Gallen Mafia: Homosexuality, Communism, and Freemasonry