As the writer of the ff article fails to mention Benedict XVI at all, I thought it best to supplement the article by posting a few
items displayed on Page 1 of the results from a Google search for "Benedict XVI and the loss of a sense of sin".
'The greatest sin is losing the sense of sin'
One wonders if Pope Francis and his pet Cardinals Cupich and Coccopalmerio
comprehend the impact of sin upon human nature — and hence upon human reason
by Eduardo Echeverria
February 11, 2018
In an October 1946 Radio Message to the Participants in the National Catechetical Congress of the United States in Boston, Pope Pius XII spoke a prophetic word:
“Perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.”
Early in his pontificate, on January 1, 2014, Pope Francis echoed Pius in a homily. One wonders, however, whether Pope Francis, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, and Cardinal Francis Coccopalmerio are as adept as Pius in comprehending the impact of sin upon human nature —and hence upon human reason — as it savagely wounds and seriously disturbs our nature’s proper functioning, particularly in explaining the dynamics of marriage and family life in contemporary culture?
In his recent address at the Von Hügel Institute, St. Edmund College, in Cambridge, England, Cardinal Cupich claimed:
Pope Francis offers in Amoris Laetitia a new way of relating to the lives of families today by introducing a set of hermeneutical principles. These principles are deeply rooted in Scripture and Tradition and yet are profoundly attentive to the dynamics of marriage and family life in the contemporary world.
Francis’s first principle is, according to the cardinal, that
“if we accept that families are a privileged place of God’s self-revelation and activity, then no family should be considered deprived of God’s grace.”
Putting aside the questionable claim that
the family is the privileged site of God’s self-revelation (where is the Church in this view when, according to Catholic ecclesiology, it is the Catholic Church that has the fullness of the means of salvation?),
this principle excludes attending to the sinful dynamics of marriage and family life in contemporary culture. There is much talk about grace, but no attention is given to sin. [A hallmark of Bergoglianism, the religion of ueber-Nice, in which one must never ever talk about anything unpleasant - and though Bergoglio has in many ways 'abolished sin', as Eugenio Scalfari rightly concludes, he and his followers, find the very idea of sin unpleasant in the extreme indeed, because of some residue of Christian teaching still in their brain cells.]
Thus, while he focuses at the start of his speech on Gaudium et Spes, Cardinal Cupich presents an anthropology that actually overlooks the teaching of
Gaudium et Spes §13 — and hence of Christian revelation — namely, that there is a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness in human life, and hence within our culture:
Examining his heart, man finds that he has inclinations toward evil too, and is engulfed by manifold ills which cannot come from his good Creator. Often refusing to acknowledge God as his beginning, man has disrupted also his proper relationship to his own ultimate goal as well as his whole relationship toward himself and others and all created things. Therefore, man is split within himself.
As a result, all of human life, whether individual or collective, shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness. Indeed, man finds that by himself he is incapable of battling the assaults of evil successfully, so that everyone feels as though he is bound by chains.
But the Lord Himself came to free and strengthen man, renewing him inwardly and casting out that “prince of this world” (John 12:31) who held him in the bondage of sin. For sin has diminished man, blocking his path to fulfillment. The call to grandeur and the depths of misery, both of which are a part of human experience, find their ultimate and simultaneous explanation in the light of this revelation. (GS,§13)
St. John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical
Centesimus Annus §25, echoes
Gaudium et Spes §13 but also quotes §16 when he wrote that
“man, who was created for freedom, bears within himself the wound of original sin, which constantly draws him towards evil and puts him in need of redemption. Not only is this doctrine an integral part of Christian revelation; it also has great hermeneutical value insofar as it helps one to understand human reality. Man tends towards good, but he is also capable of evil.” [I have remarked here a couple of times that I don't think Bergoglio believes in Original Sin at all - that he feels it was a huge mistake for God to have been so 'merciless' in punishing Adam and Eve and through them, the whole human race. Because Bergoglio does not believe in punishing anyone - and so he preaches this myth of an all-merciful God whose mercy is not tempered in any way by justice nor genuine charity towards the sinner.
When he repeats his mantra, "God accepts you just as you are", he implies somehow that sinners do not have to do anything to change themselves to correct their situation - that 'amend my life' we promise in the Act of Contrition and when we go to confession. And so, for Bergoglio, remarried divorcees living in chronic adultery don't even have to abstain from conjugal relations (pending a regularization of their marital status in the Church, e.g., by annulment of a Catholic marriage previously biding one or both of the civilly remarried couple) but can go ahead and receive communion if they 'discern' they are worthy of communion!]
It is precisely this integral part of Christian revelation, which is central to Christian anthropology, that is missing in Amoris Laetitia. And it is also missing in Cardinal Cupich’s recent address as well as in Cardinal Coccopalmerio’s 2016 Commentary on Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia.
In Chapter 6 of his brief study, Coccopalmerio concludes with the claim that Pope Francis’s “hermeneutics of the person” — in short, the pontiff’s 'Christian' anthropology — affirms that “the person has value in itself” and “is therefore important and lovable.”
“the person, and therefore every person in whatever condition they find themselves, has value in and of themselves, despite the elements of moral negativity.”
[No one disputes that, but it is the duty of the Church and her ministers who are directly responsible for the care of souls, to make sure that each individual overcome these 'elements of moral negativity', which is a fancy phrase to say 'sin'.]
Put differently, using traditional theological distinctions, Coccopalmerio is distinguishing the order of creation and the order of fall into sin — except he doesn’t say anything about the order of the fall into sin and the latter’s impact upon human nature.
However, John Paul II affirms this distinction in orders (see Part I of his magnum opus,
Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body), as does the
Catechism of the Catholic Church in its teaching on a theology of sin and also on marriage (§§385-421, 1601-1620).
But, in a lopsided manner, Coccopalmerio's 'hermeneutics of the person' does not reflectathe integral hermeneutics of creation, fall into sin, and redemption. In particular, unlike Gaudium et Spes and John Paul II, he — as well as Cardinal Cupich — pays no attention to the “great hermeneutical value [of sin] insofar as it helps one to understand human reality.”
Now, Amoris Laetitia affirms that
mitigating factors and complex situations make it impossible for us to say that the divorced and civilly remarried, or, for that matter, by implication, a cohabiting couple (whether homosexual or heterosexual) “are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace” (§301). One of the reasons given for this claim is that a couple “may know full well the [moral] rule [namely, that sexual intercourse of a man and a woman outside of marriage is morally wrong], yet have great difficulty in understanding ‘its inherent value’” (§301; see also §298).
Is this reason sufficient in specific cases to claim that individuals are not culpable for living in a state of mortal sin or deprived of sanctifying grace, as Francis and Coccopalmerio claim?
Significantly,
Cupich simply abandons all discussion of culpability — crucial for the moral logic of pastoral reason in Amoris Laetitia in discerning whether “all those in any ‘irregular’ situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace” (AL §301). He merely makes
the unqualified assertion that no family whatsoever (“not restricted to those [families] who meet the Church’s marital ideals,” according to Cupich) should be considered deprived of God’s grace because they are the privileged site of God’s self-revelation.
Regarding the claim of diminished culpability that follows from having great difficulty in understanding the inherent truth or good regarding limiting pre-marital sex to marriage, it is clear that
rejecting this precept does not as such diminish culpability because an individual may “‘take little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when [his] conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin’ [Gaudium et Spes §16].
In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits”
(Catechism of the Catholic Church §1791).
This, too, is Aquinas’s view when he speaks about how understanding a moral precept may be distorted “by passion, or evil habit, or an evil disposition.” None of these factors figures centrally in Al’s account, nor in the accounts of Coccopalmerio and Cupich, regarding civil marriage or cohabitation
(Amoris Laetitia §294).
Pope Pius XII, in comparison, has a sense of sin’s hermeneutical value in explaining human reality, particular through natural reason. In his 1950 encyclical
Humani Generis he refers to the concrete situation in which we exist as fallen human beings and the noetic effects of
original sin, which leaves the proper ordering of our intellectual powers to the truth in a precarious, confused, and disordered state (see §2).
In this, Pius echoed Thomas Aquinas, who argued that the knowing powers of human reason suffer the wound of ignorance and are deprived of direction toward truth; additionally, that the disordered state of our intellectual powers also affects “man’s desire to know the truth about creatures,” for he may wrongly desire to know the truth by not “referring his knowledge to its due end, namely, the knowledge of God.”
Furthermore, according to Aquinas, a man may fail to know that something is true because human reason may be perverted. Indeed, he identified five ways in which that may be the case: passion, evil habit, and evil disposition of nature, vicious custom, and evil persuasion. J. Budziszewski, in Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, succinctly explains Aquinas’s view:
Corruption of reason by passion: Momentarily blinded by grief and rage, I unjustly strike the bearer of the news that my wife is deep in adultery with another man.
Corruption of reason by evil habit: little by little I get into the habit of using pornography or cutting corners on my taxes. At first my conscience bothers me, but eventually I can see nothing wrong with my behavior. . . . although I am still capable of restraint, it is more difficult for me than it might be for someone else.
Corruption of reason by evil disposition of nature: a defect in one of my chromosomes predisposes me to violence, abuse of alcohol or homosexual acts. although I am still capable of restraint, it is more difficult for me than it might be for someone else.
Corruption of reason by vicious custom: I have grown up among people who do not regard bribery as wrong, and so I take it for granted.
Corruption of reason by evil persuasion: I use electronic tricks to make free long-distance telephone calls, justifying my behavior by the theory that I am merely exploiting the exploiters.
Thus, wounded human nature does not merely suffer the loss of a supernatural addition to our natural human reason. Aquinas, for one, makes clear that
original sin, which wounded human nature, involves the dissolution of a natural harmony pertaining to human nature, which he also calls a “sickness of nature.”
As he stated:
“original justice was taken away by the sin of the first parents. as a result all the powers of the soul are in a sense lacking the order proper to them, their natural order to virtue, and the deprivation is called the ‘wounding of nature’. . . . in so far as reason is deprived of its direction toward truth, we have the ‘wound of ignorance’.” Thus
reason is, as Etienne Gilson put it, “stripped of its disposition for truth.”
It isn’t that wounded natural reason as such is unable to grasp certain truths about God, man, and the world after the fall; rather,
the necessity of divine revelation is justified by the “weakness of human reason which, left to itself, would inevitably become entangled in the grossest errors.”
In conclusion, since the fall had an effect on the whole of human nature, including natural reason, human reason has been “wounded and weakened by sin”
(John Paul II, Fides et Ratio §51). Hence,
any account of human reality that ignores the great hermeneutical value of sin in that account cannot be said to be deeply rooted in Scripture and Tradition, contrary to the claims of Cardinals Cupich and Coccopalmerio.
I find the choice of papal photo to illustrate the poster emblematic of how the powers-that-be at St. Edmund's appear to consider Bergoglio as a pop icon above all else!
I had been wondering why Cupich was invited to deliver the annual Von Hügel Lecture at St. Edmund's College in Cambridge - and I have not yet come across an
explanation. St Edmund's College is one of the 31 constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge - it only accept students reading for either masters
or doctorate degrees, or undergraduate degrees if they are aged 21 or older. The Von Hügel Institute is one of the college's 2 research institutes; it was founded
in 1987 to carry out research on Catholic Social Teaching. Considering the topic Cupich spoke about, one must conclude that, God help us all!, the Institute
considers AL a significant 'development' in Catholic social teaching. Especially since the man they chose to give this lecture in 2017 was Cardinal Luis
'mini-Bergoglio' Tagle...
BTW, I looked up Cupich's academic credentials - he earned his bachelor's degree in theology from the Pontifical North American College in Rome in 1974, then
his Master's in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1975, and a doctorate in Sacramental Theology (!) from Catholic University of America in 1987.
Curiously, although he finished seminary in 1971, he was not ordained a priest till 1975. Obviously, he is far from unlettered, but his entire formation was
post-Vatican II, and a review of his church career shows a series of ultra-liberal post-V2 positions. No wonder Bergoglio found him his perfect prototype cardinal
for the Church in the USA. (Wikipedia tells us that the cardinal's last name is pronounced SOO-pitch. He has Croatian ancestry.)
Fr Hunwicke, an Oxonian to the marrow, has had two short comments so far on Cupich in Cambridge ('the other university' for Fr H):
Cupich the Super Slippery (1)
February 10, 2018
Lecturing yesterday at the other university, Cardinal Cupich gave a superb example of cunning slipperiness. In its skill, it is positively beautiful. In its scope, breathtaking.
"Their [married couples' and families'] decisions of conscience represent God's personal guidance for the particularities of their lives. In other words, the voice of conscience ... (is) the voice of God ... or if I may be permitted to quote an Oxford man here at Cambridge, what Newman called 'the aboriginal vicar of Christ' ... could very well affirm the necessity of living at some distance from the Church's understanding of the ideal, while nevertheless calling a person 'to new stages of growth and to new decisions which can enable the ideal to be more fully realised' (AL 303)"
(1) Again, we have the very corruption I tried to nail down in a recent post,
the idea that the Law of God (neatly here packaged and neutered as 'the Church's understanding of the ideal') can be trumped, set aside, by some other factor: here, 'Conscience'. Observe also how cleverly 'Sin', in this case Adultery, is replaced by the exquisite circumlocution 'living at some distance from the Church's understanding of the ideal'. [So, in the Confessional, I suppose we shall be hearing "And, Father, I have lived at some distance from the Church's understanding of the ideal seventy three times." It will make those pre-Easter sessions in the box even more lengthy.]
(2) But also, yet more brilliantly, notice the masterly way in which Newman is parenthetically invoked to sanctify a proposition which Super Slippery could (if taken to task) deny he actually attributes to Newman. He does not actually say that his formulation is what Newman wrote, said, or thought. But by waving the name of Newman over his words and citing a single phrase ...
Wow!! What a man!
Cupich (2)
February 12, 2018
I have to rely upon second-hand accounts of how things went in the Q&A session which followed the Cambridge lecture. But I gather that His Eminence launched into lengthy and impassioned assertions of the the authority of the Magisterium. The answer offered to one questioner was
the further question (asked in deeply shocked tones) as to whether those expressing doubts or concerns about Amoris laetitia perhaps failed to believe that the Pope was inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit in writing it.
Thus the Magisterium was invoked not only in all its panoply, but in that crude form which, in the heyday of the old Catholic Evidence Guild, that Guild's speakers justly dismissed as being
a misinformed Protestant or rationalist notion of what Infallibility means in Catholic theology.
More, later, on Cupich,
Deo volente.
Cupich (3)
February 13, 2018
In the text of Cupich's Cambridge lecture, he acknowledges a widely felt problem: "While admitting that different cultural realities call for different pastoral conclusions, this is not to suggest that the existence of widely varying teachings among regions (or dioceses) is a positive element in Church life. There is still a dilemma that needs further attention and and study lest we end up with opposing magisterial directives even within regions which share a similar culture and realities in family life".
Indeed. It has often been pointed out that y
ou already get a different magisterial answer by taking that single perilous footstep which carries you from Poland into Germany. [And I seem to remember that PF sanctioned the reaction of the Polish bishops to AL as being proper for their country ... does anyone know a reference for that?]
It would certainly be highly amusing if one had in this country a different AL hermeneutic in, say, Shrewsbury and Liverpool.
Cupich goes on to sunder this particularly Gordian knot.
"In this regard, PF has now offered a pathway forward* with the publication in Acta Apostolicae Sedes [sic] of his letter to the bishops of Buenos Aires and their Pastoral which confirms that their interpretation of Amoris authentically reflects his mind as being official Church teaching. It will now be up to all in the Church, particularly the hierarchy, to respond in a spirit of affective and effective collegiality with the Successor of Peter ...".
So, although Cupich only a minute or two earlier referred to PF's own stress upon "the importance of local variation in our global Church", when the whatsit hits the thingummy there is only one valid understanding of AL. And guess which one that is ...
In an earlier age, one might have wondered how well mannered it was for a foreign bishop to visit our shores so as to lecture our bishops ("it will now be up to ... the hierarchy ...") on how they should understand their duty. But we must understand that Blase Cupich is riding high, wearing that red hat which by tradition would have gone to the occupant of a different American See, and is intoxicated with the sweet wine of pontifical favour.
His words constitute one of the most aggressive ... and totally unacceptable ... assertions so far of an extremist and absurdly simplistic misunderstanding of the role within the Church Militant of the Roman Bishop.
When Catholic professional ecumenists discuss the Roman Primacy with non-Catholics,
do they, I wonder, make clear that (once unity has been established) all discussion about a particular point at issue must instantly come to an end as soon as something is published in AAS? If not, perhaps they should start being honest enough to make it clear. Or else to disown this novel superstition.
*Notice a fine piece of weaselspeak:
Cupich means that, in his view, PF has authoritatively imposed something. In weaselspeak, this becomes "has offered a pathway forward". Observe also the equivalence apparently made: 'his [PF's] mind' = 'official Church teaching". Things get better and better!
I do not have the inclination nor the time - nor, more importantly, the grit - to read Cupich's full lecture, as I dread the very thought of encountering more Bergoglianism than I need to, but if you are interested, guess who published the full text of the lecture: none other than the pre-eminent media site for Bergoglianism, VATICAN INSIDER:
http://www.lastampa.it/2018/02/09/vaticaninsider/eng/documents/pope-francis-revolution-of-mercy-amoris-laetitia-as-a-new-paradigm-of-catholicity-skMox0lKtoX5szfKH6QgrL/pagina.html
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/02/2018 03:03]