| Editor: Brother Bruno Bonnet-Eymard | N° 93 – June 2010 |
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BENEDICT XVI AND THE HOLY SHROUD
On Sunday, 2 May, the Pope made his pastoral visit to Turin in order to meet the youth. Then, before returning to Rome, he visited the Duomo, the cathedral of Saint John the Baptist where the Holy Shroud was exposed to the veneration of the faithful. After a moment of silence, the Pope took the floor:
« How does the Shroud speak? It speaks with blood, and blood is life! » What does this mean? The blood that flows in the human body is life. Yet if it flows out of wounds… it means death, does it not? That is the case here:
« The Shroud is an icon written in blood, the Pope continued, the blood of a man who was scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified and pierced in His right side. »
So, he is well and truly dead!
In fact, according to Benedict XVI, « the image imprinted upon the Shroud is that of a dead man, but the blood speaks of his life ».
How is it possible to understand this unless it is specified that this dead man is called Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead? The Pope, however, does not say it.
He suggests it, though: the Holy Shroud is « a winding-sheet that was wrapped round the body of a man who was crucified, corresponding in every way to what the Gospels tell us of Jesus ». Benedict XVI did not say anything else, leaving open the question of whether this “coincidence” is due to the fact that the winding-sheet was really wrapped around Jesus’ Body after His death or if it is the work of a medieval “forger” who wanted to make us believe it. He nevertheless led all the thoughts of his listeners to that conclusion when he said that « the image imprinted upon the Shroud » was an « icon ». Thus, it is the work of an artist.
The rest of the Pope’s “meditation” no longer has anything to do with the data furnished by a hundred years of scientific examinations of this « icon », which lead to this certain conclusion: it is not made by human hands, which thus confirms twenty centuries of tradition that have held it to be “acheiropoietic”, not made by hands…
So, how was it made and by whom? Who was this artist of genius? This is the question that the Pope neglects, or rather deliberately refuses to ask because he is a Modernist. St. Pius X pointed out, when he condemned Modernism for that very reason, Modernism raises a wall between the realm of faith and that of science. The question of the Artist of the “icon” and of the methods he used to produce his masterpiece, however, is a question that comes under science. Thus, the Pope will show no concern about it!
From then on, Benedict XVI’s “meditation” is completely out of touch with the concrete reality of the object about which he is speaking: « The Image impressed upon the Shroud is that of a dead man, but the blood speaks of his life. Each trace of blood speaks of love and of life. It is like a spring that murmurs in the silence, and we can hear it, we can listen to it in the silence of Holy Saturday. »
Thus, as a perfect Modernist, Benedict XVI substitutes a divine “revelation” that everyone can « hear » in the intimacy of his individual consciousness for the scientific proof according to which « each trace of blood » – identified by chemical tests – contributes to the historical fact of Christ’s death and resurrection. Meanwhile, the Church is silent as to the resurrection of Christ and only announces His death.
Our epoch has become a « Holy Saturday », the Pope said. How true it is if we comprehend it as a “Holy Saturday” of the Church! This, however, is not what the Pope means. Here he offers a typical example of what the Abbé de Nantes termed the « naturalising of the supernatural ».
In fact, Benedict XVI declares that today, « after having lived through the past century, humanity has become particularly sensitive to the mystery of Holy Saturday ».
The war that modern atheism wages against the Church is interpreted by Benedict XVI as attention paid to « the mystery of Holy Saturday »!
« The burial of God is part of contemporary man’s spirituality in an existential, almost unconscious manner, like a void in the heart that continues to grow larger and larger. » The Pope then quoted Nietzsche: « God is dead and we have killed him! »
Then, he added: « This famous saying [sic! Say rather: this vile blasphemy]is taken almost literally from the Christian tradition. We repeat it in the Way of the Cross, perhaps without being fully aware of what we are saying. »
St. Augustine, following St. Peter, who knew full well that Jesus had died because of our sins, said however to the Jews: « You are the ones who killed Him! Yet God raised Him from the dead! » This is our faith and the proof is the Holy Shroud that is visible and tangible. The evidence of the Shroud is accessible through simple, commonsense reasoning even to someone who does not have the Faith.
The most indisputable scientific conclusion – the result of a hundred years of interdisciplinary research – is that the “artist”, the maker of this « icon », is the Person who lay there, Our Lord Himself. His intention, manifested by the photography of 1898, was to leave us His portrait. This portrait does not represent Him smiling in the midst of His disciples and Apostles on a feast day, still less does it represent Him tormented by pain, but it represents Him in between the two. It is the emblematic image of His life, the “unique model” of ours: a grave visage, a Face of divine majesty, of inexpressible goodness, of infinite beauty.
Benedict XVI, however, does not even look at it. He speaks while turning his back on it, at the furthest remove from the extraordinary revelation of the Heart of Jesus reflected by this Holy Face:
« After the two World Wars, the concentration camps and the gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our epoch has become increasingly a Holy Saturday: this day’s darkness challenges all who are wondering about life and it challenges us believers in a special way. »
The truth is that the Second Vatican Council, which was a far worse cataclysm than the atomic bombings, has plunged us into « darkness » to such an extent that we no longer know exactly what we must believe in order to be saved… It is not the rest of the Pope’s “meditation” that will give us back the light of the Faith, quite the contrary! In fact, he continues:
« The death of the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, has an opposite aspect, totally positive, a source of consolation and hope. This reminds me of the fact that the Holy Shroud acts as a “photographic” document, with both a “positive” and a “negative”. »
This “photographic” nature of the image imprinted on the Holy Shroud is precisely the major proof of its miraculous character as an acheiropoietic “icon”, not made by human hands. The Pope, though, certainly does not want to draw such a conclusion that would impose the exclusive truth of our holy religion and reduce all the others to nothing, as religions invented by men.
On the contrary, the Pope declares that « the darkest mystery of the Faith is at the same time the most luminous sign of hope that has no frontier ».
In other words, this « luminous sign » shines everywhere, in all religions, and reaches the whole of humanity beyond the frontiers of the Roman Catholic Church and of Christian societies.
For the Pope, what is the “Holy Saturday” that spreads its luminous darkness or its obscure light, over « the whole of humanity »? It is the day when Jesus Christ « descended into Hell. This means that God, having made Himself man, reached the point of entering man’s most extreme and absolute solitude, where not a ray of love enters, where total abandonment reigns without any word of comfort: “Hell”. »
This no longer has anything to do with the eternal Hell, which exists and into which poor sinners fall, nor with the “Hell” that St. Peter mentions in his first Epistle when he reveals that, after having given up His soul and before rising from the dead, Jesus’s soul, separated from His Body, « went to preach to the spirits in prison, who formerly had refused to believe, when the patience of God waited in the days when Noah was building the ark » (1 Pt 3:19-20).
This descent of Christ into Hell is one of the articles of our Creed, the Apostle’s Creed, which we say every day at the beginning of our Rosary: « I believe in God the Father Almighty Creator of Heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried [in the Holy Shroud of Turin]; He descended into Hell… » For what purpose? To preach salvation to all the souls of the deceased throughout the centuries prior to His Incarnation. He even preached to the unbelievers of the time of the Flood, offering them mysteriously a last grace of salvation. Thus « was announced, even to the dead, the Good News » of the Gospel of salvation (1 Pt 4:6).
Benedict XVI, successor of St. Peter, does not believe it! It is frightening to say so but it is the truth. This Pope is a “Modernist”. This word « is not a benign one, a word without venom. Since the encyclical Pascendi (1907), it has designated, using the ostentatious name with which they designated themselves, a party of heretics of the very worst kind, determined to entrench themselves in the Church by means of pretence and false oaths, the better to destroy her traditional faith and thence the entire institution. They do this in order to replace them with a purely subjective, individual and democratic religion, where all is sentiment and freedom, adhering charismatically to the Christian mysteries while, by means of reason and science, rejecting them as outside physical and historical reality. This is because the modern mind is incapable of accepting anything outside the ordinary course of things that cannot be explained by the rational sciences. » (CCR n° 180, June 1985, p. 3)
Thus, Jesus’ “descent into Hell” after His death, a mystery of immense importance, and of such manifest richness for our understanding of the salvation of the infidels, this wonderful assurance that the masses of human beings of previous centuries had had salvation preached to them by the soul of Christ, is reduced to the insignificance of an experience of human sensitivity by the faith of Pope Ratzinger, « full to bursting with German phenomenology » (Georges de Nantes, ibid.):
We have all felt « this frightening sensation of abandonment, Benedict XVI continues. That is what we fear most about death, just as when we were children we were afraid to be alone in the dark and could only be reassured by the presence of a person who loved us. » That is phenomenology!
« So, watch out for the damage! » our Father foresaw.
Today indeed, we see the ravages caused by a Pope who deliberately takes the opposite course from Our Lady’s teaching, as we could observe on Thursday, 13 May, at Fatima. In Turin, he has already reduced the three parts of the message of 13 July 1917 to nothing:
1° the vision of Hell, strictly speaking, the place of eternal condemnation is effaced and souls fall en masse into it because there is no one to turn them away from it. Hell triumphs in the beyond.
Then, here below:
2° « the two World Wars, the concentration camps and the gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki » vainly « challenge » us because the Pope pays no heed to their meaning, which was clearly indicated by the Blessed Virgin in the second part of the Secret: « To prevent this », so all « this » could have been prevented? Of course! On what condition? Read, just read it! « To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation of the first Saturdays. If My requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. »
3° Having been dismasted, the Church, the only Ark of salvation, is on the verge of sinking into the raging sea. Benedict XVI’s predecessors did not want to pay heed to the Queen of Heaven’s demands. Their successor still does not want to pay heed. So, we have before our eyes the ruin of the Church, such as it was announced in the third part of the Secret of Fatima.
It is fortunately not the last word of this Secret. As we see the appalling curses, which were foretold, coming true to the letter, how can we be doubtful of the promised blessings that will not be long in coming:
« In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, and she will be converted and a certain period of peace will be given to the world. In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved. »