And about the greater fallacy in the Bergoglian messages last week that were broadcast urbi et orbi, in effect, namely: the sanctimonious
motu proprio explaining the creation of his latest superdicastery...
Did Jesus say, 'Go forth and promote
integral human development'?
How this pope has skewed the Lord's mandate
by Christopher A. Ferrara
September 2, 2016
Almost two thousand years ago, God Incarnate launched His Church on its saving mission with these words: “Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned.”
The Catholic Church’s divine commission could not be simpler: convert the world to Christianity for the salvation of souls.
Two thousand years later, however, in the midst of the worst crisis of faith and discipline the Church has ever experienced, we are now presented with this description of the Church’s mission:
In all her being and actions [!], the Church is called to promote the integral development of the human person in the light of the Gospel. This development takes place by attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation. The Successor of the Apostle Peter, in his work of affirming these values, is continuously adapting the institutions which collaborate with him, so that they may better meet the needs of the men and women whom they are called to serve.
These are the opening words of Pope Francis’s apostolic letter
Humanum Progressionem, which announces a continuation of the vogue in this pontificate: the Novelty of the Week.
This time it was the creation of a new “Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development,” which will absorb and thus abolish the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, and the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers.
So, according to Francis, the Church is not called to preach the Gospel to all men and baptize them for their eternal salvation, but rather “to promote the integral development of the human person” by “attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation.” The “light of the Gospel” is thus merely an aid to the promotion of justice, peace, and the care of creation.
But what about the salvation of souls?
Humanum Progressionem explicitly abrogates Articles 142-153 of
Pastor Bonus, the Apostolic Constitution of John Paul II, which created the four Vatican departments Francis has just abolished.
Tellingly, Pastor Bonus begins with these words:
“The Good Shepherd, the Lord Christ Jesus (cf. Jn 10:11, 14), conferred on the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, and in a singular way on the bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, the mission of making disciples in all nations and of preaching the Gospel to every creature.”
Pastor Bonus then proceeds to mention salvation no fewer than eleven times, including the phrases “means of salvation,” “ministry of salvation,” “salvation of souls,” “the work of salvation in the world” and the “mission to work for the eternal salvation of the people…”
Humanum Progressionem, on the other hand, says not one word about salvation, the means of salvation, or the Church’s salvific mission in its declaration of what the Church is called to do in this world. Francis, the Vicar of Christ, does not even mention Christ. [Not the first time, of course, a supposedly important if not seminal Bergoglian text fails to mention Christ or God.]
At the very beginning of his pontificate Francis declared: “The Church is not an NGO” — meaning a Non-Governmental Organization engaged in secular charitable work.
[Well, they all start out purporting to be charitable but turn out to be being pressure groups and lobbies for assorted liberal causes! As for JMB's statement about NGOs, that is certainly one his most self-deluding statements, because that is exactly what he has since set forth to do with the Church - making what is now, for all intents and purposes, the church of Bergoglio, into the world's largest NGO bar none, as a willing tool of the second-largest NGO - the UN - with all his maniacal promotion of the most fashionable causes of 'the world' today.]
But what is one to think of a Church whose mission is being reformulated before our eyes to the following: “Go forth and promote integral human development, attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation.”
The “light of the Gospel” to which Francis refers is certainly not the light of salvation, without which souls are lost for all eternity. It is something else entirely; something that employs traditional [Scriptural] language to express revolutionary new meanings.
And it is the continuing, immensely destructive revolution in the Church that this pontificate has taken to a whole new level, no doubt hastening the day when God will intervene — in a most dramatic fashion — to bring the unparalleled crisis we now witness to an end.
After the initial 'now look what he's up to' spoofs of the new Bergoglian 'works of mercy' and our sins against the environment, a couple of serious commentaries did come out. The editor of LifeSite News places it all in a larger context.
But Vatican II said a pope cannot do
what this pope is doing: using Church
authority to express personal opinion
by John Henry Westen
Editor
September 2, 2016
Pope Francis’s recent message calling on Catholics to repent of “sins” against the environment seems to come with the fullness of Church authority, not in form but in content.
Although issued only as a papal message, it uses forceful language of repentance, forgiveness, and the need for conversion, to introduce a novel category of sin heretofore foreign to Catholic understanding.
And given that the science of global warming is still under hot contention, and indeed is a matter outside of the Church's competence, the Pope is simply not at liberty to require Catholics to adhere to it.
The Second Vatican Council taught,
“It is necessary for people to remember that no one is allowed (
it did not make an exception for popes) to appropriate the Church's authority for his opinion”
(Gaudium et Spes 43).
Pope Benedict XVI reiterated the same teaching even more explicitly, saying in 2011,
“No one can claim to speak ‘officially’ in the name of the entire lay faithful, or of all Catholics, in matters freely open to discussion.”
Benedict noted that it is altogether appropriate, however, to insist on what he referred to as the non-negotiable matters.
In 2004, Pope Benedict (while still Cardinal Ratzinger) explained that while there are non-negotiable moral issues such as abortion and euthanasia, there are other issues where Catholics may legitimately differ even with the Pope.
“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia,” he wrote. “For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.”
Concluding the point, he said, “There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
In his 2007 Apostolic Exhortation
Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict listed the non-negotiable Catholic values as “respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children, and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.”
When Pope Francis first exhorted the faithful with forceful language to adhere to climate change theory in certain portions of his encyclical
Laudato Si, high-ranking Vatican Cardinal George Pell pointed specifically to those portions as non-binding.
Speaking to the
Financial Times in the wake of the encyclical, Cardinal Pell said, “The Church has no particular expertise in science . . . the Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters."
But there are varied views in the Vatican about the authority of the Pope’s views on climate change. Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a close adviser to Pope Francis and the chancellor of both the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, argued that the pope’s declarations on the gravity of global warming as expressed in the encyclical
Laudato Si’ are
magisterial teaching equivalent to the teaching that abortion is sinful. [Sanchez Sorondo has emerged as one of the more buffoonish court jesters in the immediate circle of his fellow Argentine Bergogloi.]
Father Robert Sirico, the Acton Institute's founder and president, contested Sorondo’s remarks. It is “important to underscore the distinction between the theological dimension of
Laudato Si’ and its empirical, scientific, and economic claims,” he said.
“The Church does not [and cannot] claim to speak with the same authority on matters of economics and science … as it does when pronouncing on matters of faith and morals.”
Commenting on the matter in an interview with LifeSiteNews, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, the founder of Ignatius Press who obtained his doctorate in theology under Joseph Ratzinger, said, “Neither the pope nor Bishop Sorondo can speak on a matter of science with any binding authority, so to use the word ‘magisterium’ in both cases is equivocal at best, and ignorant in any case.”
Fr. Fessio added,
“To equate a papal position on abortion with his position on global warming is worse than wrong; it is an embarrassment for the Church.”
On catholicculture.org, there is a double-barrelled attack on the two Bergoglian 'novelties of the week':
On Catholicism and environmentalism
Heading on an e-newsletter from
Jeff Mirus
Sept. 2, 2016
Pope Francis made news this week in two ways. First, he created a new dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He named Cardinal Peter Turkson as president, but — in a rare move — reserved oversight of migrants and refugees to himself.
Second, and far more controversially, on the occasion of the 2016 World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation (an observance which the Pope created last year), Francis suggested that “care for our common home” (that is, the environment) should be added to both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
I parse and raise some questions about the Pope's frequent emphasis on the environment in "Catholics and the environment: Too easily misunderstood?"
As it turns out, both Phil Lawler and I believe trying to add care for the environment to the traditional list of corporal and spiritual works of mercy is a bad idea. We explain in these two pieces:
Catholics and the environment:
Too easily misunderstood?
By Jeff Mirus
Sept. 1, 2016
Pope Francis’s suggestion that care for the environment should be considered a work of mercy may not really require any comment. But I have the feeling that many will find this startling or confusing or distressing. If I’m correct, then there is reasonable cause to address the issue.
I’ve argued in the past (in The Moral Downside of Climate Change) that the problem with a Catholic embrace of environmentalism is that
concern for the environment is often used today as a means of seizing the moral high ground, in effect shunting aside far more important moral requirements. In other words, environmentalism is too often a distraction from the hard work of self-analysis and personal reform.
But, of course, when the Church addresses the environment, she is not talking about environmentalism but about Catholicism. It is not
[and should not be] a question of adopting the materialistic focus of the environmental movement, or its common failure to distinguish different orders of being, or its pessimism about humanity (which is inescapable without recognizing the nature of the person).
It is rather a question of recovering and applying the truth that all of nature is a gift created by God, and given to us as stewards to use, conserve and bring to fruition for the common good, thereby maximizing God’s glory.
Both Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI addressed environmental concerns in exactly this way, with the human person in the center of the Divine plan.
For example, in 2002 John Paul jointly promulgated a Common Declaration on Environmental Ethics with the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. In his own encyclical on the environment,
Laudato Si’, Pope Francis expressed his debt to the Orthodox on this point. And as I explained at the time (in What Laudato Si’ is really about),
the Pope’s primary purpose is not to take one side or another in scientific debates. [There's ueber-normalist Mirus speaking! Of course, JMB has clearly taken the wrong side of the scientific debate - and though that may not have been the primary purpose of Laudato si, it is its very premise and pretext - the horse driving the cart of the Bergoglian obsession with environmentalism that more and more borders on professing the Gaean faith of the New Age] Rather:
He argues that even though the problem is of concern to all, Christianity has something special to offer in its understanding that nature is a tremendous gift of a personal Creator, and that God has set man over this gift of nature to conserve and develop it for the purposes God has ordained.
The Pope insists that only if we begin again to see ourselves in relationship to God can we begin again to understand this gift of nature, its meaning, the gratitude it evokes, and the limits and ends it imposes on our stewardship.
Our news story on the Pope’s suggestion — that we should regard care of the environment as an authentic work of mercy — picks up these very same themes.
[None of which is disputed by any right-thinking person who believes in God! What's at issue here is the consistently skewed Bergoglian priority/obsession for material and physical concerns over Jesus's injunction to "Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness..." i.e., If each person attends first and foremost to his own spiritual ecology, then his concern for physical ecology will inevitably follow.]
This is true both in Francis’s own remarks and in those of Cardinal Peter Turkson, a long-time proponent of environmental concern whom Francis recently appointed to lead the new dicastery for Integral Human Development. So again, comment may not really be necessary. In one sense, there is nothing untoward here — that is,
nothing which should concern us about Catholicism In High Places. [Really???]
No, the problem remains what it has always been with this issue:
It is extraordinarily difficult for Christians to avoid further secularization when they believe they are being encouraged by their spiritual leaders to ally themselves with powerful causes that are already championed by the world.
The environmental movement is dominated by secularists who neither recognize the spiritual component of the human person nor know the difference between a human person and an animal or plant.
In general, these people are quite wealthy. They are not prone to take significant sacrificial steps to change their own moral and behavioral flaws — the flaws which render even their environmentalism very selective. As often as not they see restrictions on the birth of new men and women as the key to saving “the environment”.
They do not recognize that the values and attitudes which are essential to proper care for the environment are exactly the same values and attitudes which lead people to respect and treasure all of God’s gifts.
I am referring here to the values and attitudes which lead us to understand and honor the purposes of human sexuality; to make lifetime commitments in marriage; to bear and raise children; to keep our families intact; to eschew divorce, contraception, abortion, pornography, gender theory, euthanasia, radical individualism, and personal luxury; in sum, to resist everything that disrupts the natural order, diminishes gratitude, and obscures the Divine plan.
All of these aberrations are not only theoretically but practically linked to environmental degradation. How many additional energy-consuming households do we have in the affluent West because people cannot stay married? How many persons, animals and plants are biologically degraded by the explosion of contraceptives? How much costly, energy-dependent sensual gratification is demanded by those who will not soothe their own restlessness in God?
People who cannot connect the dots in their most obvious and fundamental behavioral patterns will never — I repeat, never — succeed in caring properly for the environment.
This is simply impossible without learning to see with God’s eyes. And that is the danger implicit in every Catholic effort which is likely to be interpreted as being late to the party, as getting on board a secular train that has already left the station.
If Catholics are not prepared to explain that a proper care for the environment must be rooted in the love of God and obedience to His will in all things, then an emphasis on an apparently worldly initiative can do more harm than good.
With respect to the works of mercy, there is also a major danger in overshadowing the highly personal character of these works by including matters which, by their very nature, require prudential social policies to secure the common good.
I will address this on another day, but surely we can see
how easy it is to reduce the concept of personal goodness to political correctness. In the contemporary West, it is a constant temptation to delegate our moral responsibility by voting, and then to criticize those who take a more personal view of their deepest responsibilities.
Does this mean that Pope Francis should not teach the truth about Creation and the care of the environment? Certainly not. This may well be a fruitful starting point in the secular world for a significant exploration of the facts of life.
The Pope’s timely reflections on the relationship between science and truth are very pertinent here. [What reflections, exactly? How can he profess any such relation when he takes unsettled 'science' - for which far more evidence leans against climate catastrophism - for indisputable fact??? Because his prinjcipal advisers and ghostwriters on his environmental encyclical happen to be the foremost proponents of the pseudo-science of climate catastrophism?]
But the prudence of emphasizing the environment depends on whether the discussion has really been co-opted before it has even begun. It involves questions about the courage it takes to directly challenge the world by unpopular testimony, as opposed to the appearance of unseemly haste in adding a Christian voice to a gargantuan secular chorus. If Catholic intervention in the discussion of the environment does not make secularists uncomfortable—if it is not perceived by those who reject God as a rather troubling wedge—then the Church is better off emphasizing moral issues that cannot be so easily misunderstood.
It puzzles me that Phil Lawler still finds any Bergoglian novelty 'shocking', as this supposed pope's favorite tactic seems to be 'epater le monde et confondre les fideles' (shock the world and confuse the faithful) at every turn.
The Pope's shocking statement on the environment
By Phil Lawler
Sept 02, 2016
Pope Francis has often surprised, confused, and dismayed me. But nothing that he has said or done thus far in his pontificate has shocked me as much as his Message on World Day of Prayer for Creation.
What troubles me about that message is not the Pope’s call for care of the environment. Any Christian — any deist, for that matter — should recognize the moral obligation to be a good steward of Creation.
If hot-button political debates have predisposed some of us to be leery of environmentalist rhetoric, all the more reason for a Roman Pontiff to seek a different perspective, more consistent with the faith.
Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI made their own strong appeals for ecological sensitivity.
Although at times their statements made me uncomfortable [What exactly did they say that did so???], I could not disagree with their overall thrust. (And it is not the responsibility of Vicar of Christ to keep me comfortable; quite the contrary.)
Pope Francis developed these same arguments in greater depth, and with greater vigor, in
Laudato Si’. While I had some reservations about some sections of that encyclical, I could and did accept the basic message.
So again — I stress the point because I don’t want to be caught up in the wrong argument — I am not disputing the Pope’s argument that Christians should exercise greater care for the environment.
What troubles me is another, more specific aspect of this message: the assertion that care for the environment should be understood as one of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
Many of the public statements that Pope Francis has issued have raised eyebrows. More than a few have struck me as imprudent, even fundamentally misguided. But in every previous case, the Pope’s statements could be interpreted so as to conform to previous Church teaching.
If his statements had caused confusion — and many of them had — a future clarification could resolve the problem.
[Not that any clarifications have always been forthcoming, nor that any so-called clarifications have done other than to compound the confusion, much less 'resolve the problem'!]
But now Pope Francis has added to the traditional lists of corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Unless we simply ignore his statement, young Catholics of future generations will be taught that there are eight works in each category. Alongside feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, there will be listed caring for the environment. Alongside instructing the ignorant and admonishing sinners, there again will be…what, exactly? 'caring for the environment? That change cannot easily be undone.
Let me pause here to confess that I was shocked — I might even say scandalized — when St. John Paul II altered the Rosary by adding the Luminous Mysteries. Could he do that, I wondered? Could a Pope, on his on initiative, without consultation, change a great Catholic tradition?
[He did not exactly 'change' it by omitting parts of it or amending the way it is prayed , but he added to it in a positive way - and who could have or would have quibbled his choice of the mysteries he added? My wonder then was that they had not been included to begin with!] And wouldn’t the addition of the five new mysteries upset the ancient pattern in which the 150 Hail Mary’s reflected the 150 Psalms of the Divine Office?
Out of a sense of docility, and not without reluctance, I tried praying the new Luminous Mysteries, and found that they added to my appreciation of the Rosary, and of how our Lord gradually pulled back the veil that hid his divine Nature. Looking back now, I see the addition as entirely organic, enriching the contemplation of the life of Christ.
But in adding to the list of works of mercy, Pope Francis is putting things — virtuous actions, I will concede — in a category where they do not belong. When the Pope recommends turning off unnecessary lights, for example, he is making an unarguably positive suggestion; it is a good thing to do. But it is not a work of mercy, as we have always understood that term.
The works of mercy — as they were understood until yesterday — all have a human person as both subject and object. The object was a person in some kind of need. The subject was you or me: a person challenged to imitate Christ by filling that need.
In the new works that Pope Francis puts forward, the object is the natural environment, not a human soul. And I fear that many people, reading this message, will conclude that the government should make laws to protect the environment — so that the government is the subject, rather than you and me.
Yes, each of us can do his own part to care for the environment — and let me say it yet again, I fully endorse that proposition. But when it is reduced to a matter of turning off lights and joining car pools and separating paper from plastics, that recommendation, however benign, seems somehow beneath the dignity of the papal office.
There is a real danger that by plunging into this sort of mundane specificity, the Pope will dilute the authority of his own teaching office — a danger that his condemnations of blasphemy and abortion will be taken as the same sort of “nice” suggestions as his call for car pools.
Please notice — one last time — that in this brief essay I have not questioned the science behind some of the Pope’s arguments — although I do see legitimate questions to be asked at another time.
My concern here is exclusively with the Pope’s willingness to raise environmental concerns to the level of the works of mercy.
Proper stewardship of the environment is a legitimate concern for Christians: a moral imperative. But it is not one of the two great commandments to love God and love our neighbors.
[My point earlier. Nor is it among the Ten Commandments.
Anyway, isn't it troubling that in all the preaching and exhorting JMB does to promote his secular obsessions, he consistently ignores the priority of God - which both the Ten Commandments and Jesus's Great Commandment place above concern for ourselves and others. It seems that for him, God is primarily someone who gives infinitely to his creatures, and whom we should implore for mercy and forgiveness. And what about the three duties we have to God before that, the intentions with which we offer every prayer to God?
1. To adore Thee and give Thee the honor which is due to Thee, who art our one and last end;
2. To thank Thee for the graces and benefits we have received;
3. To appease Thy justice, aroused by our many sins, and to make satisfaction for them;
And only then,
4. To implore grace and mercy for myself and those near to me, for Thy Church, for all afflicted and sorrowing,
for all sinners, for all the world and for the holy souls in Purgatory.
JMB's preaching, in its exclusive focus on the materially poor and afflicted, seems to consistently ignore Matthew 6,25 ("Seek first the Kingdom of God...") and thereby, the entire mission of the Church according to Christ's specific mandate.
He has now subsumed his abiding attention to man's physical and material needs, to his mantra 'caring for our common home' as a priority if we are to able to help each other, a priority which, in his theology, appears akin to worshipping the pagan deity Gaea, Mother Earth. (His fellow catastrophists certainly do!)]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/09/2016 06:02]