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Greetings in the New Year!

I am going to start this post… and year off on a self-congratulatory note. On the Feast of St. Sylvester, known to you and me as New Year’s Eve, the Deus ex Machina blog recorded its 500,000 page view. Given that this blog was launched on the 8th of November 2014 or roughly 1150 days ago (actually relaunched since first few trial posts appeared one year earlier), this means that it has averaged about 435 page views per day.

Never would have imagined… if you know what I mean.

So one New Year resolution is to keep on keeping on…

Now on to the subject at hand. Today, on New Year’s Day I will start the new year off with some predictions.

As you dear and loyal readers know, its one thing to report while it’s quite another to forecast. What separates the two is what is known as “analysis”. And what separates the good analyst from your average one is the “predictivability” (yes, it is an actual word) of the analysis.

So when you dear reader come over to this blog, what you in fact read is your humble blogger’s engaging in “predictive analytics” (Encompassing a variety of statistical techniques from predictive modelling, machine learning, and data mining that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.)

Moving on to the first of the predictions themselves…

Prediction #1

First out of the gate, I will start off with a prediction and simultaneously provide a validatory example.

Starting with the validatory example…

As my dear and loyal readers know, from time to time I allude to the “future Council of Econe”. This is an attempt to start building a NARRATIVE on the part of your humble blogger.

Now this “future Council of Econe” NARRATIVE is not like your average run of the mill, FAKE NEWS media narrative. What separates this narrative out from the rest is that it will be one that is “organically developed”. By organic development, what is meant is that it conform to the following methodology:

Organic Development: reconciliation of reason with revelation, of science with faith and of philosophy with theology, SUBJECT TO: that source of our Faith that comes from divine Revelation.

Given that the process of such organic development is quite slow, think Sacred Liturgy, what this blogger has been doing is “sowing the seeds” for this organic narrative when there appears to be fertile ground.

One example of this strategy can be seen in the below Tweet:

As you can see from the above, yours truly was “piling on” to the Massimo Faggioli tweet here:

Needless to say, “Big Beans” as he is known in some parts of the Catholic blogosphere was trying to rattle the neo-con’s and Traditionalist’s cage with that tweet.

Among the responses to Signore “Big Beans” came from none other than the Catholic affairs journalist from the “Failing” FAKE NEWS NYTimes, Mr. Ross Douthat. Here is how Mr. Douthat responded:

Aside from the comic value of the above tweet, it would not be wise to see it exclusively in that CONTEXT.

What one needs to understand from the above information is that Mr. Douthat has in fact identified the objective reality of the present situation in the Universal Church, and that objective reality is what is known as a “binary opposite”. What we are dealing with here is a situation that the respective positions of Rahner and Archbishop Lefebvre are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Or at least in the opinion of Mr. Douthat.

No Hegelian “wiggle room” what… so… ever…

… and quite radical position for someone writing for the NY Times, if you ask me…

Drilling down a bit further into this tweet, what Mr. Douthat’s tweet encases is the non-violation of the third Law of Thought, i.e. the law of the Excluded Middle. And just as a reminder, that law states: for any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is true. But they both can’t be true simultaneously.

Therefore, ceteris paribus either Rahner is a “saint” or Archbishop Lefebvre is a “saint”. But they can’t both be “saints” at the same time.

Or at least not in the same “religion”.

And that is what I would call an objectively true claim (conclusion) based on a correct premise!

Or what Stefan Molyneux would call an “argument”.

Aside, at the 15:00 minute mark, Stefan explains the difference between Catholicism and the protestant sects without knowing it.

Moving on to the wider context of narrative, what we are a witness to in Mr. Douthat’s tweet can easily be described as a germination of the “future Council of Econe” narrative.

What is happening is that mainstream Catholics, and writing for the failing NYTime must put one in that category, are recognizing the inherent contradiction within the FrancisTheology™ as espoused by “Big Beans” and the Francis himself.

This “organic development” comes on the back of developments chronicled in our post titled Restoration Round-up 2017: Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith Goes “Lefebvrian”… (w/Updates). In that post, we chronicled how the general meeting, or the plenaria of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also recognized that a return to Tradition, as espoused by the followers of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre is the solution to their “problems”. Once again, the relevant passage:

To be more specific, sometime in or before May of 2016, the CDF Plenaria, and according to Bp. Fellay, the Prefect of the CDF himself, realized that “what appeared to be the problem that is us (SSPX), maybe it looks like a solution (return to Tradition)” for the CDF’s problem with Modernism.

And the reason that it is a SOLUTION is as simple as this: a return to Tradition eliminates ALL the inherent contradictions presently subsiding in post-conciliar NUChurch.

And the only way to clear up PUBLICLY and DEFINITIVELY that the Catholic Church rejects the Modernist, neo-Modernist and post-Modernist ERRORS, not to mention reaffirms the FOUR MARKS of the indefectible ONE HOLY CATHOLIC AND APOSTOLIC Church, is for a Council of Econe to pronounce that it is still so!

So going forward, my first prediction is that in 2018 there will be more sightings of this “future Council of Econe” narrative from the neo-conservatives, conservatives and small “t” traditionalists within the Catholic Church.

Your humble blogger will in turn be watching out for these sightings and chronicling them as they appear.

In the next post, a rather disheartening prediction.

So get ready for it, since your have been warned.