The Church and Freemasonry: the Secret February 16 Meeting in Milan -- by Roberto de Mattei

On Feb. 16, 2024, representatives of the main Italian Masonic lodges and a number of influential Catholic prelates gathered in Milan for a day of study. The seminar, sponsored at the Ambrosianum Foundation by the Gris (Group for Socio-Religious Research and Information), was attended by the three Grand Masters of Italian Freemasonry: Stefano Bisi for the Grand Orient of Italy (GOI), Luciano Romoli for the Grand Lodge of Italy of the ALAMs (GLDI,  and Fabio Venzi (in connection) for the Grand Regular Lodge of Italy (GLRI). On the Catholic side, Archbishop Mario Delpini of Milan, Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, former president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, Franciscan theologian Father Zbigniew Suchecki, and Bishop Antonio Staglianò, president of the Pontifical Academy of Theology, participated in the meeting. Archbishop Delpini gave the opening address and Cardinal Coccopalmerio the closing one. The meeting was behind closed doors, but the relevance of the participants leaked its contents, which Riccardo Cascioli first brought to light in The New Daily Compass on Feb. 19.

African, Belgian, and Dutch Bishops before the challenge of Fiducia Supplicans - by Roberto de Mattei

Roberto de Mattei

January 24, 2024

The Bishops' Conference of the North African Region (Cerna) meeting in Rabat, Morocco, Jan. 11-15, approved the Declaration Fiducia supplicans (see here), stipulating, regarding the "pastoral practice of blessings," that it is possible to give the blessing not only individually, but also to people "in an irregular situation" who present themselves together requesting it, provided this "does not create confusion for those concerned themselves or for others." This stance cracked the unanimity that had been created around the communiqué of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, signed by Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, in which the African bishops expressed clear opposition to Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández's document (see here).

Roberto de Mattei: “Quo usque tandem?” For How Much Longer, Francis, Will You Abuse Our Patience? - The Dicastery for the Faith Blesses Sin Against Nature

Quo usque tandem? Doctrine of Faith dicastery "blesses" sin against nature

Roberto de Mattei

December 20, 2023​

The Declaration Fiducia supplicans on the pastoral meaning of blessings issued on December 18, 2023 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith marks one of the lowest points of Pope Francis' pontificate. Indeed, this document, contradicting Church doctrine, approves and in fact promotes the "blessing" of "couples" living in an intrinsically immoral situation, with a special focus on homosexual couples. 

To understand the origins of what happened, one must go back to the early 1970s, when, on the wave of the 1968 Revolution, but also of the post-conciliar "new morality," forms of "openness" to homosexual relationships began to spread in the Church. According to traditional doctrine, the sexual act is in itself, by its very nature, ordered to procreation and is good only if it takes place within marriage, without being diverted from its purpose. Instead, for the new theologians, the sexual act is always good because it constitutes the most intimate and intense moment of human love, regardless of whether or not it is ordered to procreation, whether or not it takes place within marriage, and whether or not it involves men and women of different or of the same sex.

"Abolish the Patriarchy"? -- It's Actually Gone, But We Should Return to It - by Roberto de Mattei

 Why We Must Return to the Patriarchy

Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana

December 2023

After the murder of a young woman, Giulia Cecchettin, last Nov. 11, Italy has discovered that it is threatened by the "patriarchy." The title of a dossier in the Nov. 24 La Repubblica newspaper is eloquent: "Feminicides: stop the slaughter." The thesis, which is the same one spread by the mainstream media, social media, and all kinds of influencers, is that there is a massacre of feminicides and the responsibility must be attributed to the still dominant culture of "patriarchy." We need to fight patriarchy to stop violence against women.

In memoriam: Wolfgang Waldstein (1928-2023) - by Roberto de Mattei

Roberto de Mattei

November 2, 2023

The funeral of Wolfgang Waldstein, an eminent legal philosopher and exemplary Catholic, who passed away on Oct. 17, 2023, at the age of 95, was held at St. Sebastian Church in Salzburg on Oct. 31, 2023. 

"The Synod, the Dubia, and the Pope to come" - by Roberto de Mattei

 Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana

October 4, 2023

On Oct. 4, the solemnity of St. Francis of Assisi, the 16th Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on "synodality" opened. Many opposing statements and controversies have preceded and are accompanying the event.  On October 2, in the face of "various statements by some senior prelates (... ) blatantly contrary to the constant doctrine and discipline of the Church, and which have generated and continue to generate among the faithful and other people of good will great confusion and the fall into error," five cardinals made it known that they had expressed their "deepest concern to the Roman Pontiff." submitting to Pope Francis five dubia on certain issues concerning the interpretation of Divine Revelation, the blessing of same-sex unions, synodality as a constitutive dimension of the Church, the priestly ordination of women and repentance as a necessary condition for sacramental absolution.

"Prigozhin, Putin, and Western Christendom: The West is Currently Sick, but it is not Evil, and it can Recover" -- by Roberto de Mattei

Roberto de Mattei

August 30, 2023

The crash of the plane on which Wagner Brigade leader Yevgeni Prigozhin was traveling on August 23 caused no less uproar in the world's media than his attempted rebellion against Putin that occurred exactly two months earlier, on June 24, 2023. In both the first case and the second, the most cerebral hypotheses have been put forward to explain the event. There are those who attribute the bombing not to the Russians but to Ukrainians or the Americans; there are those who are convinced that there was a double on the plane and Prigozhin is still in Africa; and there are those who deny the bombing, claiming that it was all a set-up to allow Prigozhin to disappear and, at the same time, Putin to demonstrate his strength. The hypothesis that Prigozhin was made to be assassinated in revenge by Putin seems all too obvious and normal in a world where narratives are superimposed on reality, creating a climate of dark uncertainty in which nothing can be stated categorically and clearly. We are so accustomed to "abnormality" that a "normal" reading of events seems trivial to us, not least because these events present themselves to us in an often contradictory and confusing manner. 

St. Pius X and the Imponderable of what lies ahead: A Lesson for Our Time - by Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana

On the morning of Sunday, August 2, 1903, the third ballot to elect Pope Leo XIII's successor began in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro, the late pontiff's former secretary of state, could count on a majority of the votes and was about to be elected, when Cardinal Ian Puzyna, archbishop of Krakow, asked for the floor and, on behalf of His Apostolic Majesty Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, declared an exclusionary veto against his candidacy. The exclusion veto, which was abolished after this conclave, was an ancient privilege granted not only to the Austrian Empire but also to the Catholic kingdoms of France and Spain. Rampolla's election foundered, and on the evening of Monday, August 3, on the seventh ballot, Patriarch Giuseppe Sarto of Venice was elected Pope with the name Pius X. The new pontiff begged the conclave's secretary Msgr. Rafael Merry del Val to remain at his side as secretary of state. Under their leadership, for eleven years, the Catholic Church experienced one of the most fruitful eras in its history, interrupted by another unpredictable event: the assassination of the Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914.

Anglican service at the Lateran: a grave episode - by Roberto de Mattei

I would like to comment on an episode that seems to me to be grave and significant. We learned of this from an official statement of the venerable Chapter of St John Lateran, released on 20 April 2023. The statement reads:

“The Lateran Chapter, in the person of His Excellency Guerino Di Tora, Chapter Vicar, expresses deep regret for what happened last Tuesday, 18 April, within the Basilica of St John in Rome. In fact, a group of about 50 priests, accompanied by their bishop, all belonging to the Anglican communion, celebrated at the main altar of the cathedral of Rome, contravening the canonical norms. Bishop Di Tora has also explained that the regrettable episode was caused by a lapse in communication.”

 

Bishop Di Tora is the Vicar of the Archpriest of the Lateran Basilica, Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, who is in turn Vicar General of Pope Francis for the Diocese of Rome. Bishop Di Tora has attributed the occurrence to a “lapse in communication”. 

"Russophilia", the West and anti-Romanism - by Roberto de Mattei

In 2004, in a dialogue with Senate President Marcello Pera, then-Cardinal Ratzinger identified as a cultural evil of our time the self-hatred of the West (in Without Roots; Europe, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, Mondadori, Milan 2004).

One expression of this hatred of the West is "Russophilia," an intellectual tendency that became an international organization on March 14, 2023, with the presentation in Moscow of the "International Movement of Russophiles." Among the 120 representatives from 46 countries, chronicles report the presence of an Italian, Princess Vicky (Vittoria) Alliata di Villafranca, known for her keen interest in the Islamic world. Another well-known figure, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, addressed a warm message to the conference participants, stating, among other things, that "the Russian Federation undeniably stands as the last bastion of civilization against barbarism." The role of the Russian Federation "will be decisive" "in an 'Antiglobalist' Alliance that returns to citizens the power that has been taken from them, and to nations the sovereignty eroded and ceded to the Davos lobby."  

Like any error, Russophilia starts from a truth: the decadence of the West, which has turned its back on its history and values. The Magisterium of the Catholic Church has pointed out as responsible for this decay an enemy that, "in recent centuries has attempted to work the intellectual, moral, social disintegration of the unity of the mysterious organism of Christ" (Pius XII, Address of Oct. 12, 1952 to the men of Catholic Action). ...

Roberto de Mattei interviewed by La Verità - A Sharp Analysis of the End of the Francis Pontificate: "What is not conditional, and is irreversible, is the promise of Mary."

Roberto de Mattei, historian and former vice president of the National Research Council, directs the Fondazione Lepanto, the monthly Radici Cristiane, and the press agency CorrispondenzaRomana.

 

After recalling that no one can sing victory over a pile of rubble, Pope Francis reiterated that war destroys both winners and losers. These are the positions of the realist school of international relations: war may be legitimate, but it is “a form of moral failure,” as for example George Kennan wrote.

“The pope has never been a Tolstoyan pacifist. Over Leo Tolstoy he has always preferred Fyodor Dostoevsky, an author who shows the tragic aspect of reality. My impression, however, is that the war has definitively dissolved the utopia of human brotherhood set out in the encyclical Fratellli tutti.”

Do you see a change of perspective?

“War is like death. It is an indelible part of man’s destiny. The idea of a universal brotherhood is absent from the Gospel and is not a Christian value.”

But Christ asked us to love one another.

Russia's War and the Message of Fatima (by Roberto de Mattei)

The Fatima message, interpretive key for our time
  The message of Fatima is the key to interpreting the dramatic events of the last two years, and in particular what is happening in Ukraine.
  It is understandable that this perspective should be foreign to the contemporary man immersed in relativism, but what is most striking is the blindness of so many Catholics, incapable of rising to those heights which are the only ones that allow us to understand events in the dramatic hours of history. And we, after the Covid pandemic, are experiencing the dramatic hour of war.

The collaborationist front

  The facts are these: on February 21 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin, in a speech to the nation, announced the recognition of the independence of the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and then ordered that troops be sent to the Donbas region with the aim of “ensuring peace.” On February 24 Putin declared in another speech that he had authorized a “special military operation” not only in Donbas but also in eastern Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine soon turned out to be much broader and more tragic than expected, causing throughout the world a climate of profound apprehension.
What has been the reaction of Italy and the West in the face of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine? On the one hand there has been an explosion of sentiments of indignation and of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. On the other hand, however, a sentiment of affinity for Putin’s initiative has developed, which has led to the creation of a front that I call “collaborationist.”

Motus in fine velocior (2) - "With a Divisive, Useless, and Unjust Persecution, the Francis Crisis is Gathering Even More Speed" - by Roberto de Mattei

by Roberto de Mattei

On February 11, 2014, one year after the day on which Benedict XVI made known his decision to resign from the pontificate, I published an article entitled Motus in fine velocior to signal the beginning of a dizzying acceleration of time’s pace, starting with the resignation of Benedict and the election of Pope Francis on March 13, 2013. 

Benedict XVI reigned from April 19, 2005, to February 28, 2013, seven years and ten months. From the election of Pope Francis to the approach of Christmas 2021 eight years and nine months of pontificate have passed. Benedict XVI’s post-pontificate is therefore longer than his pontificate: a paradoxical fact, which makes his resignation even more inexplicable, if the only or primary reason for it was the burden of advancing age. Had he not abdicated, Benedict XVI might have died earlier, due to the natural physical and moral strain that the government of the Church entails, but he would have been forced to face what, in his view, was the most serious problem of the contemporary Church: the loss of faith.

The most serious conspiracy is not against human rights, but against the supreme rights of God -- by Roberto de Mattei

The most terrible conspiracy: that of silence

Roberto de Mattei

Since the eruption on the world stage of the coronavirus in January of 2020, the daily life of Western man has changed in unexpected ways. These changes in our lives are as radical as they are confusing and are raising disturbing questions about the ongoing pandemic.

The heretics of the first centuries and the Roman spirit (Roberto de Mattei)

The heretics of the first centuries and the Roman spirit

Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana

Over the centuries the Catholic Church has always fought the deformations of its moral doctrine on both extremes. On the one hand laxism, meaning the negation of moral absolutes in the name of the primacy of conscience, and on the other rigorism, meaning the tendency to create laws and precepts that Catholic morality does not provide. Today laxism results in modernist “situational morality,” while rigorism constitutes a sectarian temptation for traditionalism. It is against this latter danger that I want to caution, recalling what happened in the first centuries of the Church, with the heresies of the Montanists, the Novatians, and the Donatists.

Why we should pray to St. Joseph Freinademetz and for the Church in China - by Roberto de Mattei

Few know about and pray to St. Joseph Freinademetz, a missionary saint who deserves our devotion in the present hour.

Joseph was born in Oies, in Val Badia, a village in the meadows and woods at the foot of high mountains, on April 15 1852, into a family of peasants of deep faith. He was a Tyrolean, or more precisely a Ladin, a subject of Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary. The Ladins are a linguistic community spread through several valleys of the Dolomites and served by the diocese of Bressanone. It was in this small town in South Tyrol that Joseph was ordained a priest on July 25 1875. He made the choice to become a missionary and entered the Society of the Divine Word founded a few years earlier by Saint Arnold Janssen (1837-1909).

Are Canonizations Infallible? — An important new book from Arouca Press

I am pleased to announce the publication of a new book: Are Canonizations Infallible? Revisiting a Disputed Question, from Arouca Press. 

It is a 276-page collection of fifteen essays written by twelve authors: Phillip Campbell, Fr Thomas Crean, Roberto de Mattei, William Matthew Diem, Christopher Ferrara, Msgr. Brunero Gherardini, Fr John Hunwicke, Peter Kwasniewski, John Lamont, Joseph Shaw, Fr. Jean-François Thomas, and José Antonio Ureta. I served as the volume’s editor. The book includes not only sources in English but also translations from French, Italian, and Portuguese. Several of the chapters are published in it for the first time.

All the arguments you’ve ever seen in favor of the infallibility of canonizations or against it—and some you probably haven’t seen—are found in the pages of this book. Authors line up behind both sides. It is a fair and full presentation, which does not shy away from toppling “certainties” that are sometimes mindlessly repeated. The book also serves as an introduction to the history of canonization (including changes made to the process over time) and to the nature and objects of papal infallibility, with Msgr. Gherardini’s mini-treatise especially impressive in that regard. The authors go into what the papal act of canonization means or entails, the conditions it may have for moral certainty on the part of the faithful, and what it concretely demands of members of the Church.

Op-Ed: "Francis Has Unleashed a War: It Will End With the Full Triumph of Tradition." (Roberto de Mattei)

Traditionis custodes: a war on the brink of the abyss

Roberto de Mattei

Corrispondenza Romana

July 19, 2021

              The intent of Pope Francis’s motu proprio Traditionis custodes, of July 16, 2021, is to repress any expression of fidelity to the traditional liturgy, but the result will be to spark a war that will inevitably end with the triumph of the Tradition of the Church.

              When, on April 3,1969, Paul VI promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae (NOM), his basic idea was that within a few years the traditional Mass would be only a memory. The encounter of the Church with the modern world, which Paul VI was aiming for in the name of an “integral humanism,” envisaged the disappearance of all the heirlooms of the “Constantinian” Church. And the ancient Roman Rite, which Saint Pius V had restored in 1570, after the Protestant liturgical devastation, seemed destined to disappear.

              Never has a prediction shown itself more mistaken. Today the seminaries are devoid of vocations and the parishes are emptying, sometimes abandoned by priests who announce their marriage and return to civic life. On the contrary, the places where the traditional liturgy is celebrated and the faith and morals of all time are preached are crowded with the faithful and are incubators of vocations. The traditional Mass is celebrated regularly in 90 countries on all the continents, and the number of faithful who participate in it has been growing year by year, bolstering both the Fraternity of Saint Pius X and the Ecclesia Dei institutes set up after 1988. The coronavirus contributed to this growth after, following the imposition of communion in the hand, many faithful disgusted by the desecration left their parishes to go to receive the Holy Eucharist in places where it continues to be administered on the tongue.

"George Soros and Alexander Dugin: two sides of the same coin?" (by Roberto de Mattei)

In what sense may George Soros and Alexander Dugin be defined as two sides of a single coin?

In 1945 the Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994) published a ponderous work in two volumes entitled The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, London, 1945). In this work, Popper maintained that the totalitarian ideologies like communism and Nazism have a common element: claiming to possess absolute truth. The Austrian philosopher contrasted totalitarian societies with a model of social democratic organization that he called an “open society” because it is opposed to any cultural or moral “frontier.” Popper wrote this work in New Zealand, where he had emigrated after the rise of Nazism due to his Jewish origins. Subsequently, the philosopher moved to England, where he taught at the prestigious London School of Economics and obtained British citizenship.

"THE ROMAN SPIRIT: This is what we need!" - by Roberto de Mattei

Lateran Basilica

The Roman Spirit is something that one breaths in only in Rome.  The “sacred city” par excellence, the center of Christianity, the eternal fatherland of every Catholic, who is able to repeat with Cicero, “civis romanus sum”, claiming a spiritual citizenship that has as its geographical boundaries not that of a city but that of an Empire:  not the Empire of the Caesars, but that of the Church, Catholic, apostolic, and Roman.