| | | OFFLINE | | Post: 30.419
Post: 12.560 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
|
When someone like Edward Pentin - who has consistently projected seriousness and sobriety in the exercise of his journalistic occupation - finds
that he needs to blog about a Bergoglian homilette, one has to sit up and take notice, as much as one would prefer never to hear or read another
Bergoglian text at all! Our dearly beloved pope seems to be going farther and farther away from the mental discipline of simple common sense.
Should we be concerned about his sanity, or am I simply too stupid not to see the method in his madness? This homilette sounds madder than ever...
Pope Francis: Rigid people are sick
A person who is rigid in many cases conceals a "double life",
lacks the freedom of God's children and needs the Lord's help, Pope says in morning homily
October 24, 2016
Pope Francis again returned to the theme of rigidity today, saying those who unbendingly follow the law of God are "sick" and in need of the Lord’s help.
In his morning homily at Casa Santa Marta, the Pope drew on today’s Gospel reading from Matthew in which Jesus’s healing of a crippled woman angered the Pharisees, leading him to denounce the leaders of the synagogue as “hypocrites”.
This is an accusation Jesus often makes to those who follow the Law with rigidity, the Pope said. “The Law was not drawn up to enslave us but to set us free, to make us God’s children”, he said.
From Vatican Radio:
Concealed by rigidity, Pope Francis said, there is always something else! That’s why Jesus uses the word ‘hypocrites!’: "Behind an attitude of rigidity there is always something else in the life of a person. Rigidity is not a gift of God. Meekness is; goodness is; benevolence is; forgiveness is. But rigidity isn’t!” he said.
In many cases, the Pope continued, rigidity conceals the leading of a double life; but, he pointed out, there can also be something sick [behind it]. Commenting on the difficulties and suffering that afflict a person who is sincere about realizing their rigidity, the Pope said this is because they lack the freedom of God's children: “they do not know how to walk in the path indicated by God’s Law”.
“They appear good because they follow the Law; but behind there is something that does not make them good. Either they're bad, hypocrites or they are sick. They suffer!” he said.
[This is probably among the most perverse expressions of Bergoglio's distorted self-justifying exegeses of Scripture. "People appear good because they follow the Law"????
What is wrong with following 'the Law" and what 'Law' is he referring to here? People of faith follow the Law of God, as he spelled it out in the Ten Commandments, which are implicit in the two Great Commandments enunciated by Christ - to love God above all else, and to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
To love God is to observe his Law the best way we can - not choose which of his commandments we can follow, which we can bend, and which we can ignore altogether. [Of course, in AL, Bergoglio and his ghosts try all sorts of semantic casuistry to say just that: that there are commandments like that against adultery that can be bent if not ignored altogether; and if JMB treats one commandment in this way, what's to stop him from taking liberties with the other commandments, in the name of 'not being rigid', of 'being flexible'! Do not his blasphemous eucharistic leniencies constitute a violation of the First Commandment?] And to love one's neighbor as oneself follows from our love of God - and the practical measure of the Golden Rule to do unto others what you would have them do to you.]
[Pentin's note: Since this article was first published, this excerpt from Vatican Radio has been corrected to give a more accurate rendering of the original Italian text].
Pope Francis went on to recall the parable of the prodigal son, saying that the elder son showed a certain type of goodness but behind it was “the pride of believing in one’s righteousness”. He was rigid and conducted his life following the Law but saw his father only as a master, the Pope said.
“It is not easy to walk within the Law of the Lord without falling into rigidity”, he added, and concluded with a prayer calling on “our brothers and sisters who think that by becoming rigid they are following the path of the Lord". [First, someone who tries his best to live up to what God expects of man can hardly be called 'rigid'. In fact, one must find ways to let our fallen human nature conform to what God expects, which is nothing less than that we should be holy. Rigid is when you think you know best for yourself and for others, and will therefore not change anything about yourself regardless of what others (in this case, the Church, the Commandments, God himself) may think. So, tell me who is rigid par excellence by this definition?]
“May the Lord make them feel that He is our Father and that He loves mercy, tenderness, goodness, meekness, humility. And may he teach us all to walk in the path of the Lord with these attitudes,” he said.
The theme of rigidity, like his many criticisms of “doctors of the law”, is one of a number of topics the Pope returns to almost on a routine basis. [Of course, he never names who these despicable 'doctors of the law' are. Cardinals Kasper and Schoenborn are both highly credentialled 'doctors of the law' - but because they profess the same liberalisms that Bergoglio does, he calls them his favorite theologians. Among his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI certainly stand out as 'doctors of Church Law' because of which they may one day be proclaimed Doctors of the Church. Is he referring to them because of their adherence to the Law of God and to Church laws?]
He once called those who try to unbendingly follow the Law of God people as having “weak hearts” whom he confessed he would like to trip up with banana skins so they would know they are sinners. In June, he said “rigid” people in the Church who tell us “it’s this or nothing” are heretics and not Catholics. He has also warned about seminary formation being too rigid to allow for the development of priests.
To understand the Pope’s almost obsessive focus on rigidity and why he holds it in such disdain, it’s perhaps helpful to see how he views his ministry, the Church and the world.
According to one of his closest advisers, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, for Francis both the Church and the world are in constant flux, and so his pontificate is one of “discernment, of ‘incomplete thought’” for which the rigidity of rules is an obstacle. [Obviously, he applies that to God's laws as well - to the Ten Commandments and the Great Commandment of Love. God's laws as 'incomplete thoughts'! But in those commandments, what is there to discern that is not said as plainly as possible? What is there to complete? Bergoglio is saying, in effect, that even God does not have the last word, that man will always find something to change, to add or subtract to what he said - perfidious faithless men, perhaps, or men like Bergoglio and his acolytes, but not the simple believer who does not question God's Word in the commandments!]
The Holy Father, he added, doesn’t want to teach “a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world”. [But this is not simply about secular issues, much as that concerns this pope!
For him, Father Spadaro said, “neither the Pope nor the Church have a monopoly on the interpretation of social realities or the proposal of solutions to contemporary problems.”
The Pope also sees the Church as a “people of pilgrims” who transcend “any institutional expression, however necessary.” [But what is the entire 2000-year-plus history of Catholicism - Revelation, Tradition and Magisterium - if not the 'institutional expression' of the Church, which is a divine institution entrusted by Christ to humans? The People of God are not supposed to 'transcend' that but live by it in order to transcend the claims of the world! Do Spadaro and his fellow spin-doctors not realize the inanities they are saying in an attempt to 'rationalize' Bergoglio's mindset?] This tension, he added, “animates Francis’s reflection with regard to that which he has called ‘the conversion of the papacy’.
In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Francis further explains, and perhaps most clearly, where his aversion to rigidity comes from. He criticizes what he calls a "self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism" among those who "ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past." [Well, he may choose to call it 'a particular Catholic style from the past', but he is really referring to the deposit of faith that has been handed down to all Catholics and particularly to him as pope, but which he chooses to disparage, downgrade, debase and convert into a Pandora's box of probably Satanic evils.]
"A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism," he believes, "whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying." [That is soooo NOT TRUE! Teaching and imposing the discipline of the faith is not narcissistic nor authoritarian: the faith is not the personal opinion of those who carry out Christ's mission to evangelize the world - it is the Word of God translated into rules of God-pleasing human action and behavior.]
He further believes that "in neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others" and argues it is "impossible to think that a genuine evangelizing thrust could emerge from these adulterated forms of Christianity." [Excuse me, Father Bergoglio! Who are you to say that about the tens of thousands of Catholic missionaries throughout history who did spread the faith around the world even under the most impossible conditions? What do you have to show for yourself to match the results of evangelization by those missionaries, most of them unsung??? When you hypocritically write a papal document about 'the joy of the Gospel' but then say over and over that it is wrong to 'proselytize', i.e., to spread this joy to non-Catholic Christians, much less to non-Christians??? It only goes to show that you wrote EG primarily as a self-pandering manifesto.]
Elsewhere in the document, he says it is his hope "that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: 'Give them something to eat' (Mk 6:37)."
More sanctimonious one cannot be! Who exactly is he referring to in those lines??? He makes it seem that the one true Church of Christ - which he is trying his best to replace with a 'new improved model', namely, the church of Bergoglio - has been concerned only with 'imposing rules' and 'being rigid' with the faithful while ignoring the existence of material need. But in his insistence on paying attention to material need, he seems to ignore spiritual needs altogether. As if Christ came to earth to eliminate material need, and not to save souls for eternity.
It is most pitiful and abject that the current Successor of Peter should say that walking within the Law of the Lord means that people would find it difficult not to 'fall into rigidity', as if rigidity were totally negative. Strictly, religiously following any law, rule or regulation is necessarily rigid. The opposite of rigidity in this sense is flexibility.
Let us look at Merriam-Webster's definitions of 'rigid':
JMB appears to see the word only in senses 1 and 2, whereas it is senses 2, 3 and 4 that apply to discipline in the faith, i.e., following the Ten Commandments and Jesus's Great Commandment of Love. How uncharitable and merciless it is for the supposed Vicar of Christ to mock and denounce those who do their best to try and be holy, which means to overcome human nature which tends to do only what is easy!]
Finally, I think it is instructive to cite the flow of Jesus's words in Matthew 7 - which starts by the way, with the Lord's words denouncing those who see the mote in others' eyes, but not the beam in theirs (MT 7,1-5) [which is what I think of Bergoglio's carping, nagging and berating Catholics he dislikes] - and how, in many ways, his current Vicar on earth appears to be contradicting him:
The Golden Rule
12 “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets.
The Narrow Gate
13 “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many.
14 [B"How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.
False Prophets
15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.
16 By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
17 Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit.
19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
20 So by their fruits you will know them.
I'm sure any thinking Catholic will know who are the false prophets today, the bad tree and its bad fruit that must be cut down and thrown into the fire!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/10/2016 19:35] |