Orthodoxy or Otherwise?

If you are bombarded with suffering, the will of God is very clear: He wants you to become a saint

Said by Pope Michael II.

There is a problem with making this a staple of papal pastoral.

Or more than one.

1) While the Pope is the pastor of all the Church, he is not the spiritual director of each Catholic. The Church is not a socker team with the Pope as trainer. The Church, being precisely Catholic, has people of all walks. The days are past when Vatican in Exile was just Pope Michael I, his close family and friends, including obviously mother, Phil Friedl and Francis Dominic (and some more) as Seminarians and the two bishops who in 2011 conferred on him the sacrament of orders in the degrees of presbyter (Saturday) and bishop (Sunday) in the Gaudete weekend.

This means, one cannot see hundredfold fruit as the standard and anything less as backsliding or apostasy.

There are three kinds of soil Our Lord called good soil, they that bore thirtyfold, sixtyfold and hundredfold fruit. Thirtyfold means, you keep the commandments and use the sacraments so as to keep out of or continually get out of mortal sin.

2) The quote is probably genuinely from a saint to a saint ... but that actual historic adressee was one who had already signed up for hundredfold fruit. Or possibly sixtyfold. Being Catholic means signing up for at least thirtyfold, not at least hundredfold. While an unlearned man may be Pope, it's pretty annoying if his lack of learning shows in how he directs you.

Spirituality to pastoral 101: you cannot prescribe the directives given to one who has already renounced worldly success to apply to every single Catholic.

The Imitation of Christ by St. Thomas of Kempen (de Kempis as it's often Latinised) had a comment directed to priests, and therefore obviously bishops and popes too, probably quoted more than once by C. S. Lewis: "consult not thy own devotion, but the edification of thy flock" — since I don't have one, it's not adressed to me. Since Pope Michael II has one, it is adressed to him.

You cannot tell an incel writer that God is blessing his "dark night of the soul" since arguably that's not what's going on.

3) There are people who have suffered who were already saints, and God let them suffer so their persecutors could be punished, by humiliation or disaster depending on the degree of persecution. Job is a case in point. God wanted to correct him on some thing which he had said in his heart, but as to what he had said in dialogues with the comforters, He wanted to humiliate them.

4) The fact of persecution brings up, sometimes it is actually OK to resist persecution.

If you were threatened by the killings in Paracuellos, you wondering if it would be your turn, perhaps it was because God wanted you to die a martyr, perhaps it was because God wanted Franco to take Madrid and free you from those Reds.

5) If I complain about persecutions, someone (God forbid it be Pope Michael II) might (as long as he believes that sentence to apply to each and every Catholic) imagine I'm "bombarded by suffering" beyond what anyone could cure, when the kind of persecution I suffer is one which it would be easy for him, as it was easy for his predecessor, to lift, simply by not showing solidarity with what my persecutors say about me.

There are people who are doomed to poverty, because the one trade they know is one they are henceforth barred from exercising, on very good grounds. Like a cook who has got AIDS or Hepatite C. He can not serve as a cook, because a cook cut cut his own finger and in his case contamine the food, and so make more cases. God help that cook with hepatite C, whom I knew in 2005 for a week, he was an excellent host except he overestimated my desire and habituation with alcohol consumtion, I left after it became an annoyance to my stomach. But I am not in that position.

Not unless all the governments of the world have banded together to ban the free spread of my writings, as the German one decided Edda Göring could only make a living in a modest way as employee in a non-mediatic trade. In which case, that could be one thing God could punish governments for. But in which case, anyone would be free to at least have a try in getting around these unstated obstacles, since no one has bothered to actually openly ban me, officially, or if someone gave me a diagnosis, that was behind my back, and with very little examination, except of my blogs, which are not meant as a diagnostic talk, and which a lot of readers don't know how to deal with.

There was an old Jewish youtuber* who showed clips from a video featuring the AI "Maria" and who was surprised that there were Muslim immigrants who had volunteered as actors in that video. He didn't understand that the Muslim men in the video were also AI generated images. Which is a point of caution, both as to old men making judgements about aspects of internet content they don't understand, and as to AI, since there will still be such old men, and they might mistakenly think an AI generated image were an actors who had volunteered, or even a person in a real life situation, when this is not the case. That's the level of incompetence in judging me from internet content I provide, if there is a diagnosis on that side. On the side of how early I rise, that can be observed, but quite as easily misjudged by people who have no understanding of my actual situation, like when getting rid of lice involves the body needing to produce lots of new tissue every day, which involves an increased need of sleep, or when staying up late at night helps me to burn calories, for instance to get rid of a gout.

6) Speaking of which, if the late Pope Michael I had eaten less salt and drunk more alcohol, especially red wine, in moderate quantities, he might have avoided the stroke, and if someone has prayed for me to get totally off all alcohol, that prayer could have caused my gout.

God might indeed be telling me, I need a much more austere life, not just the months up to Easter, but the rest of my life. But God could also be telling me, I need to complain about people praying the wrong way and for the wrong things, from a prejudice more Evangelical or Muslim than actually Christian.

7) So, anyone pretending I am or recently was a drunkard:

• it doesn't follow from my content, if you are too old to see that, leave it for younger readers
• it doesn't follow from my gout, since sugar, spinach, salmon, white flour also trigger it, and since I'm not always able to get the peanut butter or cherry foods with real cherry (more often yoghurt with real fruit than juice) that counteract gout, it is also better since last night I was in the cyber to 4 AM
• it doesn't follow from my sleeping late, since being late in a cyber is useful both for my metabolism and for my work.

My reply to Pope Michael II was:

Or, it might be His will to punish your persecutors.

This answer is also valid for others who want to provide for my sanctity instead of for a situation where I can be a Christian and a writer without getting reprisals every day.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Agatha
5.II.2026

Catanae, in Sicilia, natalis sanctae Agathae, Virginis et Martyris; quae, temporibus Decii Imperatoris, sub Quinctiano Judice, post alapas et carcerem, post equuleum et torsiones, post mamillarum abscissionem, post volutationem in testulis et carbonibus, tandem in carcere, Deum precans, consummata est.

PS, if anyone said "open source" that's computer software, perhaps even hardware, it's computer code. The conditions of Linux' open source computer code aren't transferrable as such to texts provided on the internet. What one can do with intellectual and/or artistic property, including texts and sometimes illustrations, is Creative Commons. Here are six licences supported by Creative Commons foundation. Mine is slightly different from any of them, and provided by myself: A little note on further use conditions (there is also a French version). I do give less than CC BY 4.0 insofar as I do not permit changes to the text, I've wavered an exception for possible spelling mistakes in my French. Like CC BY 4.0, I permit and definitely welcome commercial use. However, I do not encourage making another site with a paywall. I do encourage printing on paper. I also make a stipulation outside the usual scope of these licences, namely the possibility and welcoming of voluntary "royalties" or remuneration. Voluntary, so a small start up doesn't become impossible bc of my royalty claims. But I mention remuneration so that I do not give the impression of simply doing everything for free, with no wish for such. Voluntary royalties may be a bad choice of words, since royalties by definition mean contractual remuneration. But the remuneration would at least be within the scope of my licence./HGL

* The generation whose father had been in a camp, before he got to America.