<a href="https://davidhlukenbill.com/" title="David H Lukenbill Website" rel="home">David H Lukenbill Website

This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

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Lampstand E Letter,

Mary, Mother of God, High Priest

I have believed for some time that women becoming priests in the Catholic Church was a natural result of Christ’s teaching and this new book, Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership by Ally Kateusz (read about her here http://allykateusz.com/ ) for me, finalizes the argument; women were priests in the early Church, and Mary was essentially, a high priest.

An excerpt.

“Further suggesting the importance of women in the liturgy during the early Christian era, women, and only women, were depicted in the liturgical procession to the altar table at the most holy site in Christendom, the Anastasis Church built over Jesus’s empty sepulcher in Jerusalem. By comparison, through the end of Theodora and Justinian’s reign in 565, to my knowledge, no art has survived that depicts a Christian man without a woman at an altar table in any church.17 Instead, iconographic and textual evidence supports the claim that from the beginning of the Christian era, women—both alone and with men—stood at the table and officiated the blessing, the agape, the offering, the Eucharist, the sacrifice, the Body and Blood, whatever their community called it.

“These women church leaders formed a continuous line from the first recorded church mothers, the leaders of the New Testament house assemblies, almost all of which were attributed to women—the houses of Chloe, Nympha, Apphia, Priscilla, Lydia, and Mary the mother of Mark. These women church leaders also followed in the footsteps of Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Julia, Euodia, Syntyche, Dorcas, Damarias, Rufus’s mother, Nereus’s sister, the apostle named Junia, and other women apostles. Their Jewish foremothers were their models: Mary the mother of Jesus, Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Anna the prophet, Martha, Joanna, Susanna, Salome, and many more women leaders in Judea, Israel, and the diaspora.

“The overarching goal of this study was to demonstrate how our false imagination of the past impedes our interpretation of ancient artifacts that depicted Christian women as ministerial and Eucharistic leaders. The past is political. Therein lies its power. Therein lies why it has been censored. When such evidence exists, no church can exclude women from its leadership and remain true to its origins.

“Be submissive like the Virgin.” What a horrible lie to tell a girl. How many times has it been told to how many little girls? How many little boys have heard the same aberrant teaching about how a girl should behave?

“Would my friend’s submission to a violent man have happened if her priest had taught the girls about the early Christian Mary? Would the abuse have happened if she had grown up seeing both a woman and a man celebrating the Eucharist? It was for little girls that I did this research.”

Retrieved April 5, 2019 from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-11111-3_8

Mary as High Priest

Another excerpt from the book.

“Jesus’s Mother Versus 1 Timothy

“The authors of the Six Book narrative and 1 Timothy also had opposing views on gender roles for women. According to the Six Books author, Mary acted in direct conflict with the type of gendered rules specified in 1 Timothy. Perhaps most telling is a scene that takes place when Mary is about to die. The twelve male apostles—the original eleven plus the apostle Paul —return from their missions around the Mediterranean to see her one last time in Jerusalem. When they arrive, they gather around her. Mary lifts her holy hands and leads the prayer:

“And when my Lady Mary heard these things from the Apostles she stretched out her hands to heaven and prayed, saying, “I worship and praise and sing and laud that I am not a mockery to the nations of the Gentiles … and I will praise His gracious name for ever and ever. And I cannot glorify His grace sufficiently; that He hath sent His holy disciples to me.” And after Mary had prayed, the Apostles set forth the censer of incense, and knelt with their faces down and prayed.”

“The entire passage is in opposition to the rules in 1 Timothy—Mary raises her arms to pray, speaks the prayer, and has authority over men. The final line states that after Mary raised her arms and praised God, the men prostrated themselves. This describes Mary much as Sirach 50:19–21 describes the Temple high priest: raising hands, praising God, and then the people prostrating themselves.”

Retrieved April 15, 2019 from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-11111-3_4

The complete book is Online at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-11111-3

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter: Catholic Nuns & Desert Mothers

03 Monday Jun 2019

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I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

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Catholic Nuns & Desert Mothers

The subjugation of women is the greatest wrong in history and something the Catholic Church, sadly but unmistakably, shares much responsibility.

From the beginning, when Adam’s unneeded rib was required to create a woman, through Aquinas—whose work in almost every other case is monumental—women have been marginalized, oppressed and discounted.

The importance Catholic Nuns and Desert Mothers played in the early life of the Church was very deep and still misunderstood; but the marvelous book, Sisters in Arms, by Jo Ann Kay McNamara, addresses it like no other I have read; a must read for anyone interested in the history of women religious in the Catholic Church.

Here is a quote:

“Thus, by the time the Roman Empire was crumbling in the west, women who had escaped the confinement of the gender system by renouncing sexual activity were again restricted to the wife-to-widow cycle in the institutional life of the church. Married to clergymen or partnered with them in separate living spaces, women were distinctly subordinate to the control of the episcopacy. As brides of Christ, they had to submit to the strictures that bound other wives. But their husband was, after all, in heaven and they enjoyed special prestige when dealing with his stewards. Jerome encouraged Paula to make the most of her dignity as God’s mother-in-law. This was not enough for Paula, or for Jerome either. As the fifth century opened, they joined the growing exodus of Christians who sought a return to the apostolic life in the desert. There were Christians, as there always would be, who looked back to the old radical days and still sought the transformative powers of the virgin life as exemplified by the Letter to the Galatians. Women as well as men, seeking a higher order of perfection, fled to the deserts beyond the Roman cities. There they submitted their bodies to the discipline, ascesis, that would transform them into contenders for a new martyr’s crown. There, still, the vision of Perpetua, whose heroism made her a man, lured her sisters forward.” (pp. 59-60)

Jo Ann Kay McNamara. (1996). Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England.

And, the entire first chapter is online, thanks to the Washington Post; here is an excerpt:

“Chapter One: The Apostolic Life

“The women of Galilee were the first Christians. They came up to Jerusalem with Jesus and stayed with him in the bitter hours of his death. They buried him and later announced to the other disciples who were hiding from the Romans that the tomb was empty. One woman testified that she had spoken to him, earning the title Apostle to the Apostles. Having come to believe that their teacher was God himself, who had voluntarily taken a human body to redeem humanity with his own suffering and death, they determined to pursue fulfillment of his mission. Their earthly future was bleak. Jesus’ legacy was nothing but a share in his suffering. But they believed that compassion, participating in his sacrifice through imitation, would earn them a place in his eternal kingdom. To that end, they were prepared to take up arms against the empire of this world.

“We know some names: Mary, Jesus’ mother, and her sister Mary, Clopas’s wife; Mary of Magdala, Joanna, the wife of Chuzah, and Susanna, a trio from whom Jesus had exorcised demons; Salome and Mary, the mother of the sons of Zebedee. They were childless widows and separated wives. One had lived for a dozen years with a flow of blood, presumably a menstrual disorder that made her unclean to her Jewish community. Tradition named her Berenice or Veronica. There were other women too, though we do not know whether they were part of the group who followed Jesus to the cross. The Samaritan woman, who confided with shame that she was living with a man who was not her husband, was the first apostle Jesus sent to proclaim him as Messiah. Mary of Bethany, who sat among the apostles listening to Jesus after he refused to send her off to the kitchen, and her busy sister, the practical Martha, provided hospitality for his disciples out of affection for the master. Finally, there was the nameless woman taken in adultery and the Canaanite woman who begged for her child’s cure as if for crumbs from a rich man’s table.

“The women of the gospel had no social identity, though we know that some were rich. They had fallen or leapt through the cracks in a dying order. They lived at a crossroads, a Janus time, that gave simultaneous birth to the Roman Empire and to the Christian religion. The men who should have anchored them to their society had apparently cast them adrift. For centuries, Rome had been engaged in the systematic conquest of the Mediterranean world, engulfing its diverse polities and sapping the power of their oligarchies. In general, these polities shared a sociopolitical model: the mass of people were ordered and supervised by a ruling class of “fathers” who headed great families of cadets, women, children, and slaves. In addition, the fathers controlled diverse groupings of dependents and clients. In contrast, the simpler unions of humbler people were barely recognized by the empire as marriage at all. The fathers’ public life and their family responsibilities were thus mutually dependent. As Rome undermined their public power, they also lost the ability and even the will to protect their private domain from outside intervention. The final victim of this unifying conquest was the Roman Republic itself. “

Retrieved March 10, 2019 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/sistersinarms.htm

We can help our Church by praying the traditional Rosary: “When the Virgin Mary asked us at Fatima to pray the Rosary every day, she was not asking for five decades. She was asking for fifteen. When Our Lady says “Pray the Rosary,” she is speaking of what has been termed her Psalter, a word referring to the Book of Psalms, which contains one hundred and fifty Psalms of David. From the time of St. Dominic, “Mary’s Psalter” was the 150 Hail Marys. In 1569 St. Pope Pius V, himself a Dominican, issued an apostolic letter establishing the fifteen-decades as the official Church-authorized Rosary.” (Retrieved March 14, 2019 from https://traditioninaction.org/religious/d013rp15Decades_Stretenovic.html )

____________________

David H. Lukenbill, President, The Lampstand Foundation

Post Office Box 254794 Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

E-Mail: Dlukenbill@msn.com

With Peter to Christ through Mary

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter: No. 145, February 16, 2019

17 Friday May 2019

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I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

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E Letter: Toxic Liberation Theology

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the leadership of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Pope Saint John Paul II wrote definitively on liberation theology in two documents:

1984: INSTRUCTION ON CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE “THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION” http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html

1986: INSTRUCTION ON CHRISTIAN FREEDOM AND LIBERATION http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19860322_freedom-liberation_en.html

In a new book published in 2018, the author, in writing about the decisive Theologies in the Americas conference in Detroit in 1975, noted the driving narrative—still prevalent, and advanced, I am sad to say—of those attending.

“There was a sense in which liberation theology, perceived as a Latin American import, became shorthand for a great many socio-political grievances. Global oppression tied to systems of domination within the United States worked as an overarching theme. The situation in the United States existed in a dialectical process with Latin America and the Third World. Change, the organizers believed, “demands the dismantling of the center” that dominated the American hemisphere through its political, economic, and cultural power. Latin Americans hoped to present their theology, often an abstraction in the North American debate, and challenge U.S. theologians to address oppression within their own borders. North American advocates spoke of “unmasking the demonic structures of autonomous power” obscured by the ideology of efficient markets and the “military-industrial complex.” They observed that the United States was experiencing inequality within its borders and exploiting foreign people for the advantage of an elite class. Only as a compliant middle class gained consciousness of the systems of domination and acquired a “view from below” could they join the oppressed and realize their full humanity. The agenda addressed the need to awaken the religious imagination of the middle classes, which provided the bulk of legitimation to an oppressive order.” (pp. 239-240)

Lilian Calles Barger. (2018). The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology. Oxford University Press: New York.

The root of liberation theology is the political ideology of Marxism, as noted by Cardinal Ratzinger:

“The present Instruction has a much more limited and precise purpose: to draw the attention of pastors, theologians, and all the faithful to the deviations, and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith and to Christian living, that are brought about by certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought.”

Retrieved February 8, 2019 from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html

Marxist thought is alive and well in America today and our faith is the worse for it.

Please pray the rosary—the full 15 decades Our Lady called for, as this article notes https://traditioninaction.org/religious/d013rp15Decades_Stretenovic.html —for the Church; and try praying it the way St. Louis de Montfort (a Saint of the Rosary) suggests in his book, True Devotion to Mary; full prayers here: http://www.philomena.org/rosarydemontford.asp

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter, No. 144, January 16, 2019

15 Friday Mar 2019

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I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

Teilhard, O’Connor, & the Church

This book review by Flannery O’Connor of Jesuit Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Divine Milieu published in The Bulletin, February 4, 1961, noted:

“Where is the Catholic as passionately vowed by conviction and not by convention to spreading the hopes of the Incarnation as are many humanitarians to spreading the dream of the new city?” Teilhard asks this question toward the end of the Divine Milieu, the second of his books to be published in America. It is a question depressing to answer today when the sense of expectation has largely disappeared from our religion. No writer of the last few centuries is more capable of restoring that sense to the Christian world than Teilhard, whose work is both scientific and profoundly Pauline.

“Teilhard, who was a Jesuit and a paleontologist, was not allowed by his order to publish but was permitted to continue his work and was sent to China, the best place for its continuance. There he played a major role in the discovery of Pekin man and wrote the books which are being published now after his death and which will probably have the effect of giving a new face to Christian spirituality. The first of Teilhard’s books to be published here, The Phenomena of Man, is scientific and traces the development of man through the chemical, biological and reflective stages of life. This second volume is religious and puts the first in proper focus. They should be read together for the first volume is liable to seem heretical without the second and the second insubstantial without the first. It is doubtful if any Christian of this century can be fully aware of his religion until he has reseen it in the cosmic light which Teilhard has cast upon it.” (p. 161)

The Divine Milieu, P. Teilhard de Chardin, Harpers, 1960. 139 pp. $3. Reviewed by Flannery O’ Connor. Reprinted in the book: Flannery O’ Connor: Her Life, Library and Book Reviews. Studies in Women and Religion. Lorine M. Getz. (1980). The Edwin Mellon Press: New York.

The outstanding insight—which I share completely—that leapt out to me is in the final sentence: “It is doubtful if any Christian of this century can be fully aware of his religion until he has reseen it in the cosmic light which Teilhard has cast upon it.”

The cosmic light Teilhard so brilliantly shined was that of the compatibility of evolutionary science and Catholic spirituality.

And had the Church embraced his work rather than forbidding him from publishing it, what changes might have occurred in relation to the women in the Church and the other personal identity issues involved in gender, marriage, and children, that could have negated some of the horrors that evolved through the sexual abuse scandals still plaguing Catholicism.

I believe that at some point—perhaps far into the future—the Church will recognize the treasure that is Teilhard’s teaching and he will become a saint and a Doctor of the Church.

I just found out that there is a move to accomplish this, a petition to ask Pope Francis to make Fr. Teilhard a Doctor of the Church, at https://action.groundswell-mvmt.org/petitions/declare-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin-s-j-a-doctor-of-the-roman-catholic-church

Please pray the rosary—the full 15 decades as Our Lady called for, as this article notes https://traditioninaction.org/religious/d013rp15Decades_Stretenovic.html —for the Church.

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter #143

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

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Christmas Reflections on the Apostolate

It has now been a little over 15 years that I have been involved in this work and I can surely say that it has remained a tonic for my spiritual life and a focus for spiritual practice; though the scandals of the Church during this period has, on one hand, shaken my connection to the visible Church, but on the other, it has strengthened it to the invisible.

It has also reaffirmed my belief that much of the work of our apostolate involves revealing the evil of Marx *(embracing secularism and Western politics) and the good of Mary (embracing holiness and Western theology.

One central element of Mary’s presence at Fatima in 1917 was the outgrowth of Marxism that created the revolution leading to Russian Communism (1917), and in calling for the consecration of Russia by the Pope and the bishops of the world—not yet done over one hundred years later, which still is incomprehensible to me—because the Holy Queen Mother knew the horrors Russian Communism was to unleash upon the world, which, because the Consecration was not done, did occur.

Marxism underlies Communism which spreads in modern times the ancient lie that reality is the measure of human work; while Mary serves as the founding stone of Catholicism and the ancient image of her feet crushing the head of the serpent reminds us that the battle between good and evil has already been won by the earthly ministry of her son who set forth the earthly movement that resulted in our universal Church that had for centuries been held in the capable—but private—hands of Israel as so well-articulated in the Old Testament.

The evil of Communism continues to reveal itself for the satanic vessel it is, as does the work of Satan within the Church creating monsters who scandalize our children and devastate the trust and warmth of the Church community driving so many away; yet we prevail, as was promised.

Working on the apostolate, whether it is the daily blog or other writings, such as this, keeps me working within the Church, digging deeper into her treasure house of knowledge and sanctity.

So much of this work is happenstance.

I watched Brideshead Revisited again recently and began exploring the author of the book from which the movie came, Evelyn Waugh, and came across his essay: Converted to Rome, Why it has Happened to Me, which led to obtaining the book of his essays which contained it, The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh; which also contained the marvelous essay he published in 1949: The American Epoch in the Catholic Church.

Here is an excerpt from the Converted to Rome essay, written in 1930:

“It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. It is much the same situation as existed in the early Middle Ages. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conflicting social and political forces rendered irreconcilable the division between two great groups of Christian thought. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the choice before any educated European was between Christianity, in whatever form it was presented to him in the circumstances of his upbringing, and on the other side, a polite and highly attractive skepticism. So great, indeed, was the inherited subconscious power of Christianity that it was nearly two centuries before the real nature of this loss of faith became apparent.

“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization—and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe—has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity, and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state, already existent in Russia and rapidly spreading south and west. It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests. As the issues become clearer, the polite sceptic and with him that purely fictitious figure, the happy hedonist, will disappear.” (pp. 103-104) Converted to Rome: Why it has happened to me (pp. 103-105) The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. (1983). Methuen London Ltd.: Great Britain.

And of course, history soon proved him so right as Nazism and Communism conquered and crushed the rudderless Europe, still struggling to find its way after years of occupation; though Mary warned about and provided the solution at Fatima.

Have a Wonderful Christmas Everyone and a Very Happy New Year.

____________________

David H. Lukenbill, President, The Lampstand Foundation

Post Office Box 254794 Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

E-Mail: Dlukenbill@msn.com

With Peter to Christ through Mary

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter, No. 142, November 16, 2018

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

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True Conversion

In reading a wonderful book by Rachel Fulton (Now writing under her married name Rachel Fulton Brown), I read this paragraph relevant to Lampstand, where she is writing about the Real Presence in the Eucharist in the conversion of the Saxons, and the key Lampstand related point I have noted in bold:

“To understand why, it will be necessary to consider not only the Frankish program for the conversion of the Saxons but also the contemporary reform of the Frankish liturgy and the corollary effort to instruct the laity (the “people of God”) in its significance. Above all, however, it will be necessary to consider in some depth the process of conversion itself. As we shall see, for Augustine and his readers among the Frankish clergy like Paschasius, who were concerned with the instruction of the “people,” conversion was to be understood as a process not only of instruction but of translation. In this context, Paschasius’s representation of the body and blood as historically present was an attempt to translate the written history of the Incarnation into a spoken history of the Word-made-flesh. The gap that made this translation necessary had as much to do with differences between Saxon and Frankish perceptions of history as it did with any arguable differences between “oral” and “literate” tradition. The Frankish clergy were conscious of this gap, and they were also convinced that they knew how best to overcome it: as they saw it, real translation could be effected only in a moment of sympathy, the potential convert or catechumen becoming capable of understanding and learning from the missionary only from the moment that the missionary adapted his speech to the understanding of the catechumen. Whether or not it was usual (or possible) to realize this moment in practice, the effort to do so was paradigmatic for Paschasius’s attempt to make sense of the Eucharist for Warin’s Saxon novices, and it was fundamental to his conception of the efficacy of the sacrament as a moment of translation at which God became flesh in order to adapt his divinity to the understanding and experience of human beings, making of them through the Eucharist one flesh with his own (in Christo naturaliter unum corpus)’ (p. 16)

Rachel Fulton. (2002). From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ & the Virgin Mary, 800-1200. Columbia University Press: New York.

In response to “the missionary adapted his speech to the understanding of the catechumen. Whether or not it was usual (or possible) to realize this moment in practice”, yes, this is the basis of the Lampstand mission and we believe effective transformative ministry to criminals is only possible when developed and presented by a transformed criminal.

We see the failure of the traditional approach at our rehabilitation failure page at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/ where we find that some programs actually made the problem worse.

Why so much failure? Because they generally operate from the wrong idea—that crime is caused by social conditions—while it is individual choice which drives criminality; well described throughout Catholic teaching on sin.

____________________

David H. Lukenbill, President, The Lampstand Foundation

Post Office Box 254794 Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

E-Mail: Dlukenbill@msn.com

With Peter to Christ through Mary

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter: No. 141, October 16, 2018, Communism’s Power over the Church

12 Monday Nov 2018

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Communism’s Power over the Church

__________________________

Its power began during the failure to hear the message of Fatima and increased during Vatican II when KGB assets were allowed to sit in on the proceedings, as I noted in my book:

“The Church and its doctrine of each life being precious to God, has always been attacked by the world from the day its founder was crucified, and far too often, it has become corrupted in its worldly institutional form, but the corruption by Communism, which the 19^th and early 20^th century popes had warned about so clearly, seems to have begun in earnest by the failure of the Holy Father to fulfill the command of the Holy Virgin at Fatima in 1917, to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart.

“Much of the horrors she foretold which would happen if Russia was not consecrated, have happened.

“It is within the diplomacy-influenced reasons partially responsible for that failure—the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan who lobbied to ensure the consecration would not happen, was a KGB directed operative—that we see the Vatican corruption that infected the clear support of Catholic teaching about Communism, rendering it virtually mute.

“Amerio (1996) writes about the pact between the Vatican and Moscow regarding Vatican II:

“When one is talking about the liberty of the council, the salient and half secret point that should be noted is the restriction on the council’s liberty to which John XXIII had agreed a few months earlier, in making an accord with the Orthodox Church by which the patriarchate of Moscow accepted the papal invitation to send observers to the council, while the Pope for his part guaranteed the Council would refrain from condemning communism. The negotiations took place at Metz in August 1962, and all the details of time and place were given at a press conference by Mgr. Paul Joseph Schmitt, the Bishop of that Diocese [newspaper Le Lorrain, 2/9/63]. The negotiations ended in an agreement signed by metropolitan Nikodim for the Orthodox Church and Cardinal Tisserant, the Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, for the Holy See. News of the agreement was given in the France Nouvelle, the central bulletin of the French communist party in the edition of January 16-22, 1963 in these terms: ‘Because the world socialist system is showing its superiority in an uncontestable fashion, and is strong through the support of hundreds and hundreds of millions of men, the Church can no longer be content with a crude anti-communism. As part of its dialogue with the Russian Orthodox Church, it has even promised there will be no direct attack on the Communist system at the Council.’ On the Catholic side, the daily La Croix of February 15, 1963 gave notice of the agreement, concluding: “Following on this conversation, Msgr. Nikodim agreed that someone should go to Moscow carrying an invitation, on condition that guarantees were given concerning the apolitical attitude of the Council.”

“Moscow’s condition, namely that the council should say nothing about communism, was not, therefore, a secret, but the isolated publication of it made no impression on general opinion, as it was not taken up by the press at large and circulated, either because of the apathetic and anaesthetized attitude to communism common in clerical circles or because the Pope took action to impose silence in the matter. Nonetheless, the agreement had a powerful, albeit silent, effect on the course of the Council when requests for a renewal of the condemnation of Communism were rejected in order to observe this agreement to say nothing about it.” (Italics in original. pp. 75-76). Amerio, R. (1996). Iota unum: A study of changes in the Catholic church in the XXth century. Kansas City, Missouri: Sarto House. (highlighting added)

(pp.79-81) David H. Lukenbill (2013). Catholicism, Communism & Criminal Reformation. Lampstand Foundation: Sacramento, California.

George Weigel wrote about metropolitan Nikodim:

“On September 5, 1978, the new pope [John Paul I] received [Russian Orthodox] Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches and a man who struck many Westerners as deeply pious. The KGB knew Nikodim as ADAMANT, as it knew his secretary, Nikolai Lvovich Tserpitsky (code name VLADIMIR). At the end of his private audience with John Paul, ADAMANT suffered a massive heart attack and died in the Pope’s arms. John Paul I later remarked that Nikodim had spoken “the most beautiful words about the Church I have ever heard” during their meeting; his last words, as the Pope held the fallen bishop, were said to have been “I am not a KGB agent.” But he was.”(p. 99) Weigel, G. (2010). The end and the beginning: Pope John Paul II—The victory of freedom, the last years, the legacy. New York: Doubleday.

This quote was also included in my book on page 119.

Communism’s influence appears to be alive and well, at least in China, as this story from OnePeterFive reports; though it is just a report of what might happen, not about what has happened [it appears to have happened though as of yet there are no details, but this September 28, 2018 story from Life Site News is somewhat ominous, which you can read at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/chinas-communist-run-church-declares-independence-immediately-after-deal-wi ].

An excerpt:

“The Vatican is set to sign an agreement with China by the end of the month, one that cedes control over the appointment of bishops to Beijing. In return, we are told, Beijing has agreed to recognize the pope as the head of China’s Catholics.

“From my position as a long-time observer of the machinations of the Chinese Party-State, this seems like a bad deal. The pope is ceding his very real authority to name bishops to China’s Communist authorities in return for the promise of symbolic recognition as the titular head of all Catholics in China. Might he not be giving up something for nothing?

“The Vatican originally proposed that China follow the terms of an agreement it had reached with the Vietnamese government over the appointment of bishops. Under its terms, the Vatican and the Vietnamese authorities, working together, draw up a list of potential candidates. The Vatican then chooses someone from the list who, once Hanoi ratifies the choice, is consecrated as a bishop by the pope. Such a model clearly preserves papal authority.

“This “Vietnam model” was rejected by China, however. As the official Global Times later reported, “Such a model was not accepted by China when it was tested in the country in 2005, as the Chinese authorities want total control over choosing candidates.” [italics added]

“Beijing went on to insist upon a “Chinese model”, under the terms of which the Communist authorities alone will nominate a potential candidate for bishop. The pope must then approve or reject that candidate. If he vetoes the first candidate, Beijing will nominate another.

“The pope’s “veto power,” however, is not unlimited.

“As a Chinese official familiar with the negotiations was quoted as saying, “We cannot submit endless candidate lists to the Vatican if the pontiff keeps saying no. We may have to appoint bishops unapproved by the pontiff after a set number of rounds of negotiations. Such bishops may not be legitimate under the Church doctrine, but they can still give Church services to Chinese Catholics.”

“In other words, the pope may veto an obviously unsuitable candidate or two, but Beijing has made it clear that there is a limit to the number of times a papal veto can be used. It has also limited the amount of time that the Vatican has to respond once a candidate’s name is submitted.

“This means that at the end of the day it is the Communist authorities, and not Pope Francis, who will have the final say over who becomes a bishop in the Chinese Catholic Church.

“The Vatican is reportedly prepared to make other concessions as well.

“Perhaps the most important is that Pope Francis will formally consecrate as bishops seven men who were made “bishops” by the Communist authorities over the past decade. All of these men have been previously rejected by the Vatican as bishop candidates for various reasons having to do with personal morality, public actions, or both.

“In a further concession, the Vatican has promised that the Pope will lift the excommunication of the seven illicit “bishops” of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association even before the new agreement is signed.

“Second, the Pope will order two bishops of the underground Church, who have faithfully served for decades under intense persecution, to hand over their dioceses to bishops appointed by the Communist authorities. Shantou Bishop Zhuang Jianjian has been ordered to retire, a decision that has caused enormous pain to the local Church, while Mindong Bishop Guo Xijin has been told that he will be made an “auxiliary” of the Shantou diocese he has long headed.”

Retrieved September 15, 2018 from https://onepeterfive.com/vatican-to-allow-beijing-to-name-bishops/

How right the Holy Mother was at Fatima, and how wrong the Church leadership has been to ignore her direction; pray for the Holy Father and the Queen of Heaven.

____________________

David H. Lukenbill, President, The Lampstand Foundation

Post Office Box 254794 Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

E-Mail: Dlukenbill@msn.com

With Peter to Christ through Mary

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter, July 2018, Liberation Theology & the Historical Critical Method

06 Saturday Oct 2018

≈ Leave a comment

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

Liberation Theology & the Historical Critical Method

They are connected—both erected on an atheistic and Marxist foundation—and understanding them is vital to effective ministry to criminals as much of the criminal/carceral narrative has developed from their convergence.

The greatest theologian of our time, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, has set the mark for Catholic discussion of each.

Writing as Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Faith in 1984 about liberation theology:

“The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of freedom and a force for liberation. In recent years, this essential truth has become the object of reflection for theologians, with a new kind of attention which is itself full of promise.

“Liberation is first and foremost liberation from the radical slavery of sin. Its end and its goal is the freedom of the children of God, which is the gift of grace. As a logical consequence, it calls for freedom from many different kinds of slavery in the cultural, economic, social, and political spheres, all of which derive ultimately from sin, and so often prevent people from living in a manner befitting their dignity. To discern clearly what is fundamental to this issue and what is a by-product of it, is an indispensable condition for any theological reflection on liberation.

“Faced with the urgency of certain problems, some are tempted to emphasize, unilaterally, the liberation from servitude of an earthly and temporal kind. They do so in such a way that they seem to put liberation from sin in second place, and so fail to give it the primary importance it is due. Thus, their very presentation of the problems is confused and ambiguous. Others, in an effort to learn more precisely what are the causes of the slavery which they want to end, make use of different concepts without sufficient critical caution. It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to purify these borrowed concepts of an ideological inspiration which is compatible with Christian faith and the ethical requirements which flow from it.”

(Introduction) Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”.

Retrieved June 28, 2018 from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html

Writing as Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 on the historical-critical method of scholarship:

“As historical-critical scholarship advanced, it led to firmer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath which the real object of faith—the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus—became increasingly obscured and blurred. At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this Jesus (who could only be discovered by going behind the traditions and sources used by the Evangelists) became more and more incompatible with one another: at one end of the spectrum Jesus was the anti-Roman revolutionary working—though finally failing—to overthrow the ruling powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief. If you read a number of these reconstructions one after the other, you see at once that far from uncovering as icon that has become obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold. Since then there has been growing skepticism about these portrayals of Jesus, but the figure of Jesus himself has for that very reason receded even further into the distance.

“All these attempts have produced a common result: the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him. This impression has by now penetrated deeply into the minds of the Christian people at large. This is a dramatic situation for faith, because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.” (p. xii)

Pope Benedict XVI. (2007). Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Doubleday: New York.

Liberation theology says truth and salvation rests in political struggle and the historical critical method of viewing the past, present, and future, is the key unlocking that knowledge.

Both of these movements separate the divine Christ from Christ the man, heaven from earth, human history from supernatural truth; and their success in so doing, has largely, though temporarily, negated the power of the Catholic Church—who alone is able to provide forgiveness of sin and salvation—the strongest power against the evil of Communism and these two sin-negating narratives it engendered.

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter, No. 137, June 16, 2018, Marxism & Atheistic Roots

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

≈ Leave a comment

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter, No. 137, June 16, 2018, Marxism & Atheistic Roots

Those roots negate eternal values, elevating only what works obtaining self/state interests, and this excellent article about the evil the Holy Mother at Fatima tried to stop with the Pope consecrating Russia, which the Church has not delivered on, from Crisis Magazine, show the fruits.

An excerpt.

“On July 17, 1918, an event occurred that clarified the meaning of the subsequent century of Communist revolutions. Czar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, their five comely children, and a few steadfast friends were shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned to death in a basement in the Ural Mountains. The purge was executed by a vanguard of the People’s Revolution, as ordered by the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Lenin. Like all subsequent “Chairmen,” “Helmsmen,” “General Secretaries,” “Ultimate Leaders,” and “Gardeners of Human Happiness” (a Stalin sobriquet), Lenin was given to hard pruning. No angel from heaven or devil in hell stayed the red hand wielding the revolutionary shears. If bourgeois conscience weakens resolve, Lenin and his spiritual heirs, from Mao, to Castro, to Xi Jinping—as alike as reptiles hatched from the same egg—had carte blanche to remold humanity on a colossal scale. The first “Gardener of Human Happiness” framed the big picture for a commissar squeamish about forced famine in the Ukraine: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.”

“Marxist apologists see these “excesses” of Stalinism as a regrettable though understandable feature of ur-communism. No need, like nonagenarian ex-Nazis, to rebrand themselves in Argentina; or to confess that terror inheres in their ideology. Whether in East Germany, Cambodia, Cuba or China, the story doesn’t stray from the essential plot line. While generic, it is too monstrous to be boring.

“Hoping to shade my “broad-brush” condemnations of the Great Socialist Experiment, a liberal acquaintance lent me The Motorcycle Diaries, a movie about a good Communist—Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The biopic portrays Che as a champion of the marginalized, a scourge of exploiters. My acquaintance found Che irresistible. But as Robert Conquest noted, people tend to be reactionary about things they take the trouble to understand, and grisly tales of Cuban émigré neighbors in New Orleans had put me on the scent of La Revolution; Armando Valladares’s memoir (Against All Hope) of his arrest and degradation on the Isla de Pinos—Fidel’s sunny Gulag—amplified my neighbors’ dark sketch. It was thus quite impossible to see Che as an avatar of St. Francis of Assisi who just happened to hate God. With his beret, mustache, and halo of cigar smoke, this beau idéal of the romantic revolutionary was destined for movie lore—and for use as a branding tool. Che wear—fatigues, caps, pajamas for the kiddies—still enjoys a brisk trade among consumer-society lefties. But while Che was more camera-friendly than “Papa” Stalin, his pock-marked, lupine idol, he was just as lethal. “When in doubt, shoot them,” he advised, a slug to the back of the head being the Che-way.

“What have Lenin, Stalin, and Che to do with Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo? Perhaps these vignettes from Armando Valladares’s Against All Hope will suggest the fearful symmetry.

“Armando’s story, like so many going back to 1917, begins with a pounding on the door in the dead of night. Fidel’s secret police have learned their revolutionary history in order to repeat it. They know, for example, that a nocturnal call instills the maximum terror. The little fish and his family, jerked from the depths of sleep, gape as in a bad dream. Even a well-wisher of the Revolution, a left-leaning sympathizer—even, say, a Bishop Sorondo—might be alarmed to see armed strangers slice up bedding, ransack closets, pry up floor boards. Anyone who’s dipped into such bedside reading as The Gulag Archipelago or The Black Book of Communism envisions the scene. The little fish and his terrified family are sure there has been some ghastly mistake, soon to be rectified by socialist jurisprudence.

“But twenty years pass, and the captive has been unable to jump the hook. After two decades on a diet of corn meal from sacks stamped NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION—of torture, of stints in solitary, of years without fruit on an island that exports it—gums bleed, teeth fall out. The starvelings, wobbling on bare, bloody feet, can’t pulverize their quota of rock. Assigned to clean out a lake of excrement, which bakes into eyes and wounds under the tropical sun, a prisoner is tempted to steal a few seconds of unauthorized break. The guardians of the revolution motivate the slacker with curses, clubbings, and jabs of the bayonet. Occasionally one of these cockroaches, octopuses, vermin, running-dogs, parasites (Communist rhetoric is a thesaurus of zoological metaphors) goes berserk and charges his rehabilitators with impotent fists. Such ingratitude means death for the subversive; and another work-detail for his comrades, grave-digging being beneath the dignity of the well-fed screws.

“Sometimes all that sustains a prisoner in the maw of a reeducation camp is his hope “against all hope” that those on the outside are demanding a reckoning. If he is religious, he trusts that his church, his bishop, his pope, are storming the princes of this world, and high heaven, for justice. To believe otherwise might threaten the very idea of Providence—and of one’s sanity.

“The thirst for righteousness in a labor camp is more than a pious myth. Prisoners often refuse to lie, even when their captors dangle a promise of freedom in exchange for “cooperation.” Like Solzhenitsyn and his fellow zeks, Valladares refused. He couldn’t pretend—for the cameras—that the Isla de Pinos was a rehabilitation center. What transpired in Castro’s labor camps, as in the Gulags, the killing fields—or in the laogai of China—always finds a witness.

“In revolutions, as in storms at sea (the observation is Balzac’s), light trash floats on the waves, while solid worth goes to the bottom. There was a priest of solid worth on the Isla named Angel Loredo, who bore, with equal valor, the same beatings and humiliations as his friend Valladares. As early as 1961, most of the good priests were deported or imprisoned. “Patriotic” prelates like Monsignor Azcarante, the Bishop of Havana, stayed on—as cozy with Castro as with Battista. In fact, they enjoyed palatial housing, Alfa Romeos, and “good press.” Fidel had them over for dinner and the finest Havana leaf—to help in the planning of social justice and poverty relief. Like Che, Castro’s preferential option was always for los pobres.

“Visitors were rare, but Castro made an exception for the mitered mediocrity of Havana. Sitting with Father Loredo under some shade trees, Bishop Azcarante counseled Father Loredo to spurn Valladares and his reactionary hunger strike. Why persist in a futile gesture, unknown to the outside world?

“But the prisoners had smuggled in a radio. They knew that their “futile gesture” was news. The bishop, says Valladares, “lied knowingly, and the only object of his visit was to demoralize us.” Is it not a mystery—of iniquity—that these atheist regimes always find serviceable churchmen, an Azcarante in Cuba, a Sorondo in China, to demoralize the resistance?

“Not all bishops were so pliable. After it had become clear that Castro was indeed taking the Marxist path, the Cuban hierarchy had denounced communism. The regime then seized Catholic schools, abolished religious instruction, and exiled unpatriotic clergy. Hundreds of priests were banished; or, like Father Loredo, given a government-paid vacation to the Isla de Pinos. Cooperators—“the light trash” of Balzac’s simile—were as snug as they had been under Battista. The Vatican’s “Our-Man-In-Havana,” was a Monsignor Zacchi, who proclaimed Cuba “pagan before the Revolution … but a believer under communism.”

“Today another prelate hails the reign of Christ in another atheist tyranny. Bishop Sorondo discovers “the moral leadership that others have abandoned” in The People’s Republic of China. Of all the societies in this sinful world, the same regime that leads the world in firing squad executions, that coerces women to kill their unborn children, that bulldozes churches and jails “unpatriotic” bishops, that tells peasants to forget about Jesus, for only the Party can help you—is, according to Bishop Sorondo, “the best implementer of Catholic Social Doctrine.” Readers have encountered similar effusions, equally remarkable for callousness or fatuity, in Paul Kengor’s Crisis articles; so I will spare them further recitation. Suffice it to say that the spirit of Monsignor Zacchi and Bishop Azcarante lives on; or as G.K. Chesterton expressed the phenomenon: “experience beats in vain on the breast of the congenital progressive.”

Retrieved May 24, 2018 from https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/primer-communism-fellow-traveler-bishop-sorondo

Understanding Communism and the social/cultural/atheistic/criminal/carceral narratives coming from it—particularly in the light of Fatima—should play a large role in the transformation of criminals; a subject we covered extensively in the Lampstand book, Catholicism, Communism, & Criminal Reformation.

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter, No. 136, May 16, 2018, America’s Doing Okay

31 Tuesday Jul 2018