OLDTHINKER UNBELLYFEELS DUCKSPEAK*

It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Orwell

The Mad Mullah of Tradistan strikes again!

In his latest fatwā (viz., the December 2013 Most Holy Trinity Seminary Newsletter), the ragin' rector reprises his cretinous attacks on Bergoglio's characterization of traditionalists as neo-pelagian. "Dumbo Don" turgidly insists Bergie's use of the term "is a manifestation both of his ignorance concerning the nature of the heresy, as well as a stupidity in applying it to us." (Ed. Note: Yes, we know: We've corrected this painfully slow learner before on this point, but the Readers believe his persistence of imprecision calls for a reminder.)

Apart from the fractured syntax, the rector, who's always trying to revive his dead-on-arrival uprising against Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX, blindly misses what Papa Pancho's up to. That's more than stupid: that's downright dangerous.  P²'s word choice is not a "manifestation": it's a manifesto -- and lots of folks (including Traddie youth) are signing on.

Papa Pancho is leveraging the star-power of his office to own the debate by fixing the definitions. It's the skilled polemicist's ploy to gain the upper hand in any dispute. The new rhetoric of Vatican II gives him the cover he needs to broaden and distort -- the Conciliarists would probably say enrich -- the dictionary meaning. A fawning, collaborating "Catholic" world press makes it all seem orthodox.

Bergo couldn't care less about the pedantic scoldings of an out-of-touch mental pip-squeak like the rector because he has the whip hand. How else could Pancho have gotten away with his Protestant-like dismissal of a spiritual bouquet of 3,500 or so rosaries and made it sound Catholic when he said these pious gestures don't exist anymore⁉ That alone, we should think, merits his appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

Like all authentic progressives, Bergie is a shrewd totalist who views language as the chief means of securing the revolution through thought reform and control. His intuitive understanding of semantic tactics in an era of mass-communication skirmishes and celebrity worship makes him, in fact, the most formidable Modernist corsair ever to lead a boarding party onto the Barque of Peter. Writing off Pancho as stupid and ignorant is madness, a sure token the battle is lost.

If the rector had been properly trained in real academic institutions, he would have detected in Bergoglio's writing all the features of Orwellian linguistic theory. Untrained as he is, hidebound in his thinking, cut off from the current of history, flailing "Big Don" can't manage to connect the dots. Pancho and his cadre of ghost writers and Modernist theologians know perfectly well the classic definitions of pelagian and neo-pelagian. To think otherwise is to underestimate fatally an enemy with a big idea.

The Modernists are convinced that language determines, or at least strongly influences, thought. What's more, they're past masters in building both equivalence and issue frames to manipulate perception. At its monstrous birth, the Novus Ordo exchanged the Church's age-old code of precise theological expression for a kind of amorphous ecclesiastical Newspeak. Its terminology is fluid. Vocabulary shifts endlessly in a calculated effort to eliminate all meanings other than those favored by the revolutionary élite -- especially those meanings that threaten to subvert the new thought-climate. Words and their concepts are so fundamentally altered that they controvert their lexical signification. This radical redefinition of the elements of discourse has but one objective: to support the overarching revolutionary policy, which in this case is what George Orwell called the "continuous alteration of the past."

If Traddielandia weren't so destitute of intellectual capital, its petty chieftains could launch a cool-headed, persuasively reasoned campaign to expose Bergie's rhetorical chicanery. People, now worried about how powerful forces collude to manipulate their thinking, might be willing to pay attention to a sober analysis of Papa Pancho's deadly strategy. If competently done, such an analysis could possibly open some Novus Ordites' eyes to the heresiarch's psychological alienation from unchanging Catholic truth. 

That, however, would require both a rigorous education and an honest acknowledgment of the enemy's strengths. More importantly, it would also entail forsaking all the shrill name-calling, a guttersnipe's exercise useless against Bergoglio's overwhelmingly positive media image. Even if the Bergomeister were stupid and ignorant (and Bergie is not), no one will listen because his public persona counsels otherwise. (That twinkle in his Jesuitical eye and the impish, grandfatherly smile would win 'em over every time!) Only the squirming, gibbering zombie culties, from whom cultured traditionalist Catholics of every stripe recoil in loathing, relish "Big Don's" ineffectual nastiness.

Tradistan's howling ghazies are incapable of the intellectual agility required to discredit Bergie and his tribe. Crippled by an unspeakably impoverished priestly formation and unable to think out of the box, they just don't get it. Their needle's stuck. The witless Poobahs, permanently mired in the eighties, rattle dull sabers against mirages while everyone else has moved on. The behind-the-times Panjandrums continue to raid madly the abandoned outposts of the Trad desert while a masterly foe lays claim to the oases, safe in the certain knowledge that his crazed detractors are harmless to everyone -- except to themselves.

THERE'S AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE OUTWITTED SEDE CULT MASTERS. BUT FIRST, YOU HAVE TO GET OUT!

* Why not translate the title yourself? Click here!