Bergoglio with representatives of the Italian Forum delle Famiglie.
Last week, I posted this brief item:
Sometimes, depending on his audience,
Bergoglio remembers to be 'Catholic'
Meeting with members of Italy's national Forum of Family Associations on June 16, Pope Francis underscored that there is only one family recognized by God, that which comes from the union of a man and a woman - "there are no other family forms" - and that "selective abortion is like Nazism in white gloves".
There is a terrible translation of the original Italian article in the Huffington Post
www.huffingtonpost.it/2018/06/16/papa-francesco-la-famiglia-e-solo-uomo-donna_a_23460514/?ncid=tweetlnkithpmg...
some parts of which may raise eyebrows, but as Antonio Socci points out,
there has only been embarrassed silence from the Left to the Pope's words on the family, considering that last week, new Family Minister Lorenzo Fontana unleashed vehement attacks from the left and the LGBT groups they support when he made similar statements.
(At least, Fontana didn't say that
"Even if the man and woman are not believers, as long as they love each other and unite in matrimony, then they are in the image and likeness of God. That is why marriage is such a great sacrament". Ooops! Would non-believers have a sacramental marriage, to begin with? And a human being need not get married to be 'in the image and likeness of God' - we are all created that way.)
So why didn't he say any of this but simply kept silent during the great French debate on 'marriage for everyone' and after the corresponding law was passed in 2014, nor on the occasion of the 2016 Irish referendum that recognized same-sex 'marriage', nor when the Cirinna law which did so in Italy was debated and passed that same year?
I do not doubt Bergoglio opposes abortion on demand but he is careful not to say this too often and only to selected groups because he wants to have his cake and eat it too (oppose abortion but not trumpet his views in larger forums so as not to provoke the disaffection of the secular world he so loves to woo).
As for God making every human being in his image and likeness, how does he square that with his never-denied statement to Juan Carlos Cruz that God made him the way he is - though there is nothing in Genesis that says God made humans other than man and woman, and the Old Testament is rife with God's punishment of sexual deviants (or is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah one that won't be found in the Bible of the church of Bergoglio)?
Aldo Maria Valli had a more extended reaction to Bergoglio's seemingly 'orthodox' statements.
Clearcut words on the family?
Unfortunately no!
Translated from
June 18, 2018
A friend said to me: “You must be happy now that the pope has spoken in favor of a family created from the union of a man and a woman. Is that ot what you ‘traditionalists’ have been wanting him to say?”
My answer was simple: No, I am not happy. And for many reasons. First,
if we have come to a point where we have to consider it news and a reason to be happy that the pope, any pope, has said something ‘Catholic’ means that something is already very wrong, to begin with.
The second reason is that
the words he spoke off the cuff contain errors that will simply feed more equivocation and confusion. Let’s listen to him:
“Today, sad to say, one speaks of ‘diversified’ families, of different types of families. It is true that ‘family’ is a generic word, as in family of stars, families of trees, of animals – it is generic. But there is only one human family that is the image of God, man and woman. Only one. It may be that a man and a woman are non-believers, but if they love each other and unite in matrimony, then they are the image and likeness of God, even if they do not believe in him. It is a mystery: St. Paul calls it ‘a great mystery’, ‘a great sacrament’ (cfr Eph 5,32). A real mystery.”
Let us focus on this sentence:
“It may be that a man and a woman are non-believers, but if they love each other and unite in matrimony, then they are the image and likeness of God, even if they do not believe in him.” [Words most worthy of a world-class anti-Catholic!] Really??? Is it really sufficient that a man and a woman, though non-believers love each other and unite in matrimony (What matrimony? Civilian? Catholic? Does it not make a difference?) to become the image and likeness of God?
[Besides, every man is created in the image and likeness of God as God originally conceived his human creatures would be. Until with the free will he endowed on them, Adam and Eve quickly opted for the devil-destroyer instead of God-creator, and he needed to send down his Son to give fallen man a chance to regain his original God-given nature – in the image and likeness of God - through the grace of living as Christ commands us.]
And can the pope really cite St. Paul to support his view? Let us first read Ephesians 5 in full:
1 So be imitators of God, as beloved children,
2 and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.
3 Immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be mentioned among you, as is fitting among holy ones,
4 No obscenity or silly or suggestive talk, which is out of place, but instead, thanksgiving.
5 Be sure of this, that no immoral or impure or greedy person, that is, an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
6 Let no one deceive you with empty arguments, for because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the disobedient.
7 So do not be associated with them.
8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light,
9 for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.
10 Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.
11 Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness; rather expose them,
12 for it is shameful even to mention the things done by them in secret;
13 but everything exposed by the light becomes visible,
14 for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says:
“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light.”
15 Watch carefully then how you live, not as foolish persons but as wise,m
16 making the most of the opportunity, because the days are evil.
17 Therefore, do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.
18 And do not get drunk on wine, in which lies debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit,
19 addressing one another [in] psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and playing to the Lord in your hearts,
20 giving thanks always and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.
21 Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22 Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
23 For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.
24 As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her
26 to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
27 that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
28 So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
29 For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church,
30 because we are members of his body.
31 “For this reason a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.”
32 This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
33 In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.
As we see, Paul says indeed that two becoming one flesh is a great mystery, but only if they do so in the light of Christ, according to divine law and therefore, the law of the Church. To say that any couple, even if they are non-believers ipso facto become this ‘great mystery’ is a distortion. A serious one.
It is not enough to love and unite in matrimony (of any kind) in order to be in the mage and likeness of God.
It is not human love that sanctifies matrimony. What sanctifies a union and makes it an image of God is the presence of God. If I don’t ‘invite’ God into my marriage, if I don’t unite myself to another in matrimony in the light of Christ and in obedience of divine law, if I don’t ask for God’s blessing, if I don’t live marriage in its sacramental dimension, I can love whoever I want but I cannot claim that the union will bring me closer to being in the image and likeness of God.
Nor can I use St Paul to back me up. If only because Paul’s words (taken with those of Jesus in Matt 19,3-6) have a decisive consequence which is, the indissolubility of the marriage bond. And that is the fundamental reason why I cannot be happy at what the pope said. Because once again, it is a source of confusion.
And I will be told: But you are never going to be satisfied! No, I am only trying to be the Catholic that I am.
There is yet another reason I am not happy with the pope’s words: The pope who said them to the Italian forum of family associations, defending the family as one created from the union of a man and woman and condemning abortion as Nazism in white gloves is the same one who then went on to invite Fr James Martin, paladin of the LGBT cause, to be a featured speaker at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin this July.
The same pope who, returning from his trip to World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, told the media that it was not necessary to harp too much on questions like abortion and same-sex ‘marriage’, the same one who allows invitations to leading representatives of worldwide abortion advocacy to come and lecture at the Vatican, the same one who said that he could never understand the words ‘non-negotiable values’ used by his predecessors, the same who in Amoris Laetitia defends cas-by-case situational morality. And so on and so forth.
So, what then is this pope’s teaching? The answer is that,
with Pope Francis, papal magisterium now longer reaffirms truth but, as he himself says, only to ‘start processes’. Prof. Roberto Pertice explained it well in his essay
Fine del cattolicesimo Romano (The end of Roman Catholicism):
We have a pontificate that intends to de-construct the figure of the pope and the papacy itself, to make papal magisterium more elastic and adaptable, to de-potentiate the sacraments, to minimize the importance of the search for stable principles, to sustain the primacy of the [presumed] concreteness of reality over the [presumed] abstraction of laws.
These are what one must take into account when considering this pontificate. Without ever ceasing to point out, in any case, its internal contradictions and ts true and proper doctrinal errors, whether they are deliberate or not.
Not surprisingly, the more charitably-inclined Robert Royal seems to take Bergoglio at his word - what it was, that is, when he spoke to the Italian forum of family associations:
Francis condemns 'eugenic'
abortions and fake marriage
by Robert Royal
JUNE 18, 2018
I’d been on the road for much of the past week and hadn’t been very carefully following the news. But I woke yesterday to
the heartening news that Pope Francis had strongly condemned selective abortion and the various attempts to redefine marriage as something other than a life-long commitment between one man and one woman.
Even more, he did so off-the-cuff, departing from the text he had prepared to deliver to the Forum delle famiglie, the national forum of Italian family associations. It’s usually been on just such occasions – when he speaks spontaneously and “from the heart” – that he’s delivered the most troubling remarks of his pontificate. It was largely because of those remarks and his early criticism of Catholics who are constantly “insisting” and “obsessing” on life issues and marriage that he alienated and, sad to say, even lost the confidence of many active Catholics – even before the ambiguities and implied [doctrinal] infidelities of Amoris laetitia.
He has, of course, condemned abortion and gay “marriage” on multiple occasions. But the world, Catholic and not, seemed to sense that his heart wasn’t in it. The coverage of his recent remarks in the main secular outlets was very brief, usually just reproducing parts of an Associated Press story – quite a contrast to the extensive coverage when he seemed to be moving towards modern culture.
The
Wall Street Journal made the obvious observation that the latest remarks were “unusually strong for a pope who has generally played down medical and sexual ethics and taken a strikingly conciliatory approach to gay people.”
The question arises: why now? There was the humiliating spectacle last month of the Irish overwhelmingly voting to rescind a law prohibiting abortion, after voting for gay marriage in 2015. Perhaps more to the point, just this past week, legislators in Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies approved a bill allowing abortion up to fourteen weeks by just four votes.
Pope Francis was silent about Ireland – a very odd reticence by a man who has no qualms about weighing in on public issues like climate change, fossil-fuel exploration, immigration, Middle Eastern politics, Buddhist persecution of Muslim Rohingyas, international economics – the list goes on. All these have moral dimensions, of course, though it’s hard to see what expertise or insight the Vatican brings to such complex situations. By contrast, allowing abortion in Ireland means the direct and immediate killing of thousands of innocents.
The pope was (perhaps) not entirely silent on this question in his native country. Back in March, he sent a letter to Argentina. It was only five paragraphs in length and mostly a thank-you for a letter he had received congratulating him on completing five years as pope. It was quite mild and, even when he turned to the question of abortion, mixed together multiple issues:
I ask you all that you be channels of the Good and the Beautiful, that you lend your support in defense of life and justice, so that peace and fraternity may appear, so that you make the world better by your work, so that you care for the weakest, and share with full hands all that God has given you.
You would have to be an Argentinean to know for certain whether this was read as strong opposition to impending abortion changes, or whether this was the right tone given the way particular nations respond to papal comments – but
the official Vatican News account didn’t even mention abortion.
Perhaps that was one reason why the latest comment was not at all subtle, more in keeping with what many Catholics expect from the occupant of the Chair of Peter. Pope Francis went to the modern touchstone of evil, comparing “selective” abortions (usually because of fetal abnormalities, sex, etc.) with the Nazi eugenics program of race purification. This time, he says, we are doing the very same thing “with white gloves,” as if it’s just a medical procedure.
Though
it comes too late for the millions of innocents who will die now in Ireland and Argentina, still, it’s good that Francis gave this full-throated affirmation. We might add it wasn’t only the Nazis who practiced eugenics in the name of racism: Margaret Sanger, hero to so many American abortion advocates and founder of Planned Parenthood, took the same view – though maybe she wore lace-gloves.
It’s interesting that Francis was also so vocal about marriage. The off-the-cuff remarks refer a lot to Amoris laetitia, the very text that many of us feel both seeks answers to current troubles with marriages and – despite the announced intention of pursuing a path of mercy and discernment – weakens, perhaps implicitly contradicts, Our Lord’s strong words about the indissolubility of marriage. And will likely lead to even further confusion and breakdown.
Still, there are very good things in the recent remarks: “Life in a family: it’s a sacrifice, but a beautiful sacrifice. Love is like making pasta: you do it every day. Love within matrimony is a challenge, for the man and the woman. What’s the biggest challenge for a man? To make his wife more a woman. More woman. That she grow as a woman. And what is the challenge for a woman? To make her husband more of a man. And thus they go forward, both of them.”
This insistence on growing into being men and women will not win the Holy Father any awards at the U.N., or the E.U., or the various gender activist groups that have half-welcomed the tone he adopted from the first days of his papacy. There are other things in these off-the-cuff remarks less straightforward. But he’s affirmed “male and female He created them” and supported traditional marriage.
Where would the Church be now if only, as pope, he had stayed close to these sorts of peasant insights and not been drawn into the swamps of modernist German theology? [Too little, too late - and too suspect and too pat. He was tailoring his words to the audience he happened to be addressing - traditionalist, orthodox Catholic Italians. And none of it can ever neutralize, let alone abrogate, the sense and practical consequences of the apostate AL.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/07/2018 22:38]