(LifeSiteNews) — History is often seen as a simple progression of events driven by a cast of characters that lead up to our own day. However, the Catholic perspective of history views it as the intervention of God in time, leading all back to Him.
My guest on today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show is Timothy Flanders, a convert to the faith from Eastern Orthodoxy, podcaster, and editor-in-chief at OnePeterFive. We discuss his book City of God vs. City of Man: The Battle of the Church from Antiquity to the Present, which seeks to “offer a framework to understand Christian culture,” his conversion to Catholicism from Orthodoxy and Protestantism, and Our Lady of Fatima.
Flanders converted to the Catholic faith shortly after Pope Francis ascended the Pontifical Throne. According to Flanders, despite the crises of the current pontificate, Catholicism “still surpasses Eastern Orthodoxy” for several reasons, especially because Catholicism allows for the resolution of dogmatic controversies.
According to Flanders, the difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism in terms of such resolutions comes from the Orthodox view of authority. “In reality, what it comes down to is that in Eastern Orthodoxy, there are as many popes as there are priests, because every single priest that you go to in the Eastern Orthodox Church is your spiritual father,” he tells me.
Flanders also gives responses to potential Protestant objections to the Francis pontificate, explaining that Scripture can resolve any difficulty when read with the eyes of faith. Using Matthew 16 as an example, Flanders explains that when Peter confesses Christ to be the Messiah, he is acting in conformity with God. However, several verses later, when Christ calls Peter Satan, Christ is still in charge, but it is Peter that is emphasizing his own human capacity and power.
Discussing his book City of God vs. City of Man, Flanders, citing Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, explains that religion is the “pivot of history,” because it is religion that drives culture. According to Flanders, there are four elements of culture: the cultus, which is the liturgical worship or “a visual and audible representation of divine mysteries”; the tradition, which explains the meaning behind the cultus; the elders, which defend the tradition; and piety, which is the respect given to the elders.
When asked about the various cultural issues we face today, Flanders opines that we are living in an “anti-culture,” which acts as an inversion of culture, something he argues comes from liberal ideology.
“With liberalism, with the American Revolution, the French Revolution, all these different liberal revolutions, what we have is first the cultus is removed from public society, and what is valued is a revolt against tradition and elders without piety,” Flanders explains. “So it’s a … complete repudiation of the very essence of what a basic culture is.”
The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV) has described assisted suicide as sometimes being the “greatest common good concretely possible” contrary to the Catholic Church’s strenuous condemnation of the practice.
This betrayal of the Catholic faith by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia is not for the first time, with the PAV repeatedly causing scandal under his watch by:
- recently appointing a notorious pro-abortion atheist to the organization
- claiming contraception and artificial insemination are sometimes acceptable
- insisting that priests could accompany people through assisted-suicide, and
- that Italy’s pro-abortion law is a “pillar” of the country’s social life.
SIGN: Pope Francis must remove Abp. Paglia from the Pontifical Academy for Life
“Personally, I would not practice suicide assistance,” Archbishop Paglia told an Italian journalism conference last week, “but I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions we find ourselves in.”
Accepting an anti-life Italian court ruling that specified when assisted-suicide is permitted, the archbishop claimed “it is not to be ruled out that in our society a legal mediation is feasible that would allow assistance to suicide under the conditions specified by Constitutional Court Sentence 242/2019…”
From the outset of his presentation in Perugia, Paglia also undermined the authority of the Catholic Church on matters of faith and morals, stating: “First of all, I would like to clarify that the Catholic Church is not that it has a ready-made, prepackaged package of truths, as if it were a dispenser of truth pills.”
SIGN: Abp. Paglia must be removed from the Pontifical Academy for Life
The PAV issued a statement on Monday trying to clarify the archbishop’s remarks, insisting that Paglia “reiterates his ‘no’ towards euthanasia and assisted suicide, in full adherence to the Magisterium”.
However, far from denouncing Paglia’s words, the PAV unsurprisingly supported its president. Referencing the Italian court ruling which partially decriminalized euthanasia by outlining exceptions to its illegality, the PAV stated it was in the context of this ruling that Paglia had made his comments.
In this precise and specific context, Msgr. Paglia explained that in his opinion a ‘legal mediation’ (certainly not a moral one) in the direction indicated by the Sentence is possible, maintaining the crime and the conditions under which it is decriminalized, as the same Constitutional Court has asked Parliament to legislate.
The PAV’s fudging of the issue was met with consternation from several Catholic commentators, with liturgist Matthew Hazell, who had highlighted Paglia’s original comments, asking “How hard is it for the @PontAcadLife to just say ‘sorry’ for scandalising the faithful? Indeed, how hard is it to actually adhere to the teaching of the Church on life issues? Are you so incapable of reading the signs of the times & interpreting them in the light of the Gospel?”
The Pontifical Academy for Life has tried & failed to explain @monspaglia‘s remarks. Paglia had spoken about the “accompaniment” needed for the dying, saying “in this context, it is not to be ruled out that in our society a legal mediation is feasible …” https://t.co/C3LU601aA2
— Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 (@MLJHaynes) April 24, 2023
Sorry guys, not good enough. Nowhere near good enough.
Archbishop Paglia’s “opinion” on the possibility of “juridical mediation” regarding euthanasia is still contrary to the Catholic faith, as has been explained already. https://t.co/qMATq0UZrL pic.twitter.com/W8s4zLvkj7— Matthew Hazell (@M_P_Hazell) April 24, 2023
Archbishop Paglia’s comments about assisted suicide being “feasible” are wrong and harmful. It’s the kind of “crack in the wall” that opponents of human life will run with to promote their agenda. The teaching of the Church is clear: Euthanasia is “morally unacceptable.” Period.
— Bishop Thomas Tobin (@ThomasJTobin1) April 24, 2023
SIGN: Abp. Paglia’s presidency of the Pontifical Academy for Life is untenable
It’s vital that the Church and PAV push back against the culture of death, rather than trying to accommodate it and accept a world that where the vulnerable are helped to kill themselves.
Be part of pushing back against the tide and making it clear that there is no room for confusion or betrayal when it comes to the sanctity of human life and the infallibilty of Catholic teaching on the matter.
SIGN AND SHARE THE PETITION WITH FRIENDS & FAMILY
MORE INFORMATION:
Abp. Paglia defends assisted-suicide as ‘greatest common good possible’ for dying people – LifeSiteNews
Flanders contrasted the anti-culture with the ancient cultures of the past, telling me that pagans had the elements of culture he mentioned. He also explained that whenever Catholic missionaries would convert one of these cultures, they would “baptize” it and build a church over the old holy sites in an effort to “[cleanse the culture] of all its demonic content.”
“These new [anti-cultures] are not even … trying to restore even a pagan version of [culture],” Flanders contends. “Dietrich von Hildebrand, he … observes that what we have now is not even … as good as paganism. It’s a lot worse than paganism, because even the pagans had a sense of wonder. They had a sense of veneration to the divine.”
Later in the episode, Flanders and I discuss an icon of Our Lady of Fatima that was hanging over his shoulder throughout the interview.
Flanders tells me that the icon was written by a Russian Orthodox Christian working in tandem with a Russian Catholic priest named Father Aleksandr Burgos, who is trying to establish a shrine to Her in St. Petersburg.
According to Flanders, the icon “incarnates the whole message of Fatima, because it is the Russian icon of Fatima.”
“And so this is something that we promote for the sake of Fatima, but also for the sake of our brethren in our Ukrainian Catholic brethren, as well as our Russian Catholic brethren at a time of this is awful war [in Ukraine],” Flanders tells me.
“And so this is also an effort of … promoting peace against this awful conflict that our brethren are facing, and promoting the gospel to unite non-Catholics, especially the Russian Orthodox, with the Holy See.”
He also explains that Our Lady’s apparition at Fatima is proof that God and Our Lady still cared for Russia at a time when the country was “descending into the greatest evil perhaps the world has ever known, in terms of totalitarian evil spreading and persecuting the Church.”
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