Cardinal Pell provides an admirable example of how to criticize Pope Francis rightly and severely in the false teachings he espouses without
ever once having to mention his name. In this way, he is upholding the Four Cardinals' DUBIA and giving the right Catholic answers to their
questions... Thank God for at least one cardinal in the pope's inner circle who is not reflexively a yes-man, especially in the things that
really matter to the faith. Too bad the pope will probably never get to read this interview or be told about it.
Cardinal Pell: Some Catholics ‘unnerved’
by current events in the Church
Says conscience must refer to revealed truth and moral law
by Dan Hitchens
Tuesday, 29 Nov 2016
Cardinal George Pell has said that “a number of regularly worshipping Catholics” are “
unnerved by the turn of events” in the Church.
['unnerved' is a euphemism - 'appalled' might be the more direct adjective].
In a talk at St Patrick’s Church, London, Cardinal Pell said one cause for concern was false theories of conscience and the moral law.
Cardinal Pell was giving a talk on St Damien of Molokai as part of St Patrick’s series of talks for the Year of Mercy. But he also reflected on Catholicism today. He said that while Pope Francis has “a prestige and popularity outside the Church” greater than perhaps any previous Pope, some Catholics are currently uneasy.
Later in his talk, the Australian cardinal, who has been asked to lead Pope Francis’s financial reforms and is a member of the Pope’s “C9” group of advisors, criticised some of the ideas about conscience which are now current in the Church.
Cardinal Pell said that
emphasising the “primacy of conscience” could have disastrous effects, if conscience did not always submit to revealed teaching and the moral law.
For instance, “when a priest and penitent are trying to discern the best way forward in what is known as the internal forum”, they must refer to the moral law. Conscience is “not the last word in a number of ways”, the cardinal said. He added that it was always necessary to follow the Church’s moral teaching. [This 'discernment' via the internal forum is, of course, the keystone of the pope's strategy to allow absolution for mortal sin, or in the case of remarried divorcees who continue to live as man and wife, for living in a state of chronic mortal sin, and therefore, to receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in a technical (because absolved in confession) but obviously farcical and false state of grace. Allowing such condonement of mortal sin case-by-case is simply the start of a the slippery slope towards allowing unconditional 'communion for everyone' as Bergoglio practised in Buenos Aires. And don't you doubt it, all the cardinals, bishops and priests who share this pope's heterodox borderline-heretical beliefs will happily slide down that slope ASAP, if they haven't already gone all the way down.]
The cardinal told the story of a man who was sleeping with his girlfriend, and had asked his priest whether he was able to receive Communion. It was “misleading”, the cardinal said, to tell the man simply to follow his conscience.
He added that those emphasising “the primacy of conscience” only seemed to apply it to sexual morality and questions around the sanctity of life. People were rarely advised to follow their conscience if it told them to be racist, or slow in helping the poor and vulnerable, the cardinal said.
His comments come after three years of debate on the Church’s teaching regarding Communion for the divorced and remarried. Cardinal Pell was among the senior figures who have publicly upheld the traditional doctrine repeated in Pope John Paul II’s
Familiaris Consortio – that the remarried should not receive Communion unless they are living “as brother and sister”.
But some prominent Catholics have suggested a different approach. For instance,
Cardinal Blase Cupich has argued that someone’s conscience might tell them to receive Communion, and that “conscience is inviolable”. [Cupich, of course, is the crassest exponent of Bergoglianism, but both his unequivocal language, however outrageous, and the Bergoglian ideas he espouses, however heretical, are at least honest and forthright, which one cannot say about his lord and master in his crafty ways of trying to avoid making any statement that can be labelled outright heretical - technically, canonically and factually.]
Cardinal Pell quoted Blessed John Henry Newman’s writings on conscience, in which
Newman rejected a “miserable counterfeit” of conscience which defines it as “the right of self-will”. He noted that Newman was defending Popes Pius IX and Gregory XVI, who in Cardinal Pell’s words, “condemned a conscience which rejected God and rejected natural law.”
The cardinal also paid tribute to St John Paul II’s “two great encyclicals”, Veritatis Splendor[/Br and Evangelium Vitae, which present the moral law as something binding in all cases.[Do you hear that, Your Holiness???]
Asked whether some Catholics’ unease about the state of the Church was related to false theories of conscience, Cardinal Pell said: “Yes, that’s correct.”
He added: “The idea that you can somehow discern that moral truths should not be followed or should not be recognised [is] absurd”. [Do you hear that, Your Holiness???]
“We all stand under the truth,” the cardinal said, pointing out that objective truth may be “different from our understanding of the truth”.
He also said that while doctrine develops, there are “no backflips”.
Cardinal Pell was asked about the letter to Pope Francis from four cardinals asking for clarification of the Pope’s recent exhortation
Amoris Laetitia. The cardinals have asked the Pope to confirm that five points of Catholic teaching are still valid. These include the teaching that the remarried cannot receive Communion unless living as brother and sister, and the teaching that some moral absolutes have no exceptions.
The Pope has not replied to the four cardinals’ request, which was sent two months ago. The cardinals have taken this as an invitation to publish their questions and continue the discussion. The head of the Greek bishops has said that the four cardinals were guilty of “very serious sins” and could provoke a schism.
Asked whether he agreed with the cardinals’ questions, Cardinal Pell replied: “How can you disagree with a question?” He said that the asking of five questions was “significant”.
In his talk, Cardinal Pell portrayed St Damien of Molokai as a sometimes difficult but very holy priest. He noted that St Damien’s ministry was partly motivated by his fear for the souls of the lepers in his care.
The cardinal said that
a priest’s pastoral strategy is heavily determined by how many people he thinks will be saved. He said that
Jesus’s words, such as “Many are called, but few are chosen,” suggest a lot of people will go to hell. The cardinal said that while he did not relish this idea,
“Jesus knew more about this than we did,” and that “our proper tolerance of diversity can degenerate” so that we believe “eternal happiness is a universal human right”. [The latter is the logical consequence of the Bergoglian gospel of mercy in which sinners can simply keep drawing on God's mercy as from an open-ended limitless ATM without amending their lives to sin less, or if possible, as Jesus said, 'to sin no more'; and the corollary Bergoglian suggestion that God is so merciful no one could possibly go to hell. As if we should all simply shrug off what Jesus said of the Last Judgment and everything else he said about burning in hell.
Cardinal Pell said that the truth about eternal punishment had been downplayed, just as a mistaken idea of conscience had become widespread. A sinful life makes it hard to perceive truth, he said, including moral truths – and so not understanding the moral law might itself be a result of sin. “The idea, now, of culpable moral blindness is discussed as infrequently as the pains of hell,” the cardinal said. [There we go! More Catholic essentials that our beloved pope really needs to accept and teach instead of constantly seeking to undermine, explicitly or by omission.]
Didn't see this Douthat column from Sunday earlier - comes from not checking out the NYT regularly...
His Holiness declines to answer
by Ross Douthat
NOV. 26, 2016
“This is not normal” — so say Donald Trump’s critics as he prepares to assume the presidency. But the American republic is only the second-oldest institution facing a distinctively unusual situation at the moment. Pride of place goes to the Roman Catholic Church, which with less fanfare (perhaps because the papacy lacks a nuclear arsenal) has also entered terra incognita.
Two weeks ago, four cardinals published so-caLled DUBIA — a set of questions, posed to Pope Francis, requesting that he clarify his apostolic exhortation on the family, “Amoris Laetitia.” In particular they asked him to clarify whether the church’s ban on communion for divorced Catholics in new (and, in the church’s eyes, adulterous) marriages remained in place, and whether the church’s traditional opposition to situation ethics had been “developed” into obsolescence.
The DUBIA began as a private letter, as is usual with such requests for doctrinal clarity. Francis offered no reply. It became public just before last week’s consistory in Rome, when the pope meets with the College of Cardinals and presents the newly-elevated members with red hats. The pope continued to ignore the DUBIA, but took the unusual step of cancelling any general meeting with the cardinals (not a few of whose members are quiet supporters of the questioners).
Francis canceled because the DUBIA had him “boiling with rage,” it was alleged. This was not true, tweeted his close collaborator, the Jesuit father Antonio Spadaro, shortly after replying to critics who compared him to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Grima Wormtongue by tweeting and then deleting a shot of Tolkien’s Gandalf growling his refusal to “bandy crooked words with a witless worm.”
Meanwhile one of those four DUBIA authors, the
combative [MILITANT but not combative, because he is, in fact, consistently non-combative, i.e., non-belligerent, much as Joseph Ratzinger always was, even as he firmly and consistently stood up for the faith] traditionalist, Cardinal Raymond Burke, gave an interview suggesting that papal silence might require a “formal act of correction” from the cardinals — something without obvious precedent in Catholic history. (Popes have been condemned for flirting with heresy, but only after their deaths.)
That was strong language; even stronger was the response from the head of Greece’s Catholic bishops, who accused the DUBIA authors of “heresy” and possibly “apostasy” for questioning the pope.
Who was, himself, still silent. Or rather, who continued his practice of offering interviews and sermons lamenting rigidity and pharisaism and possible psychological issues among his critics — but who refused to take the straightforward-seeming step of answering their questions.
[All he has to do is to answer YES or NO to five questions, but he is of course in self-estoppel from committing himself unequivocally on these particular DUBIA.]
It is not that there is any real doubt about where the pontiff stands. Across a period of vigorous debate in 2014 and 2015 he pushed persistently to open communion to at least some remarried Catholics without the grant of annulment. But conservative resistance ran strong enough that the pope seemed to feel constrained.
So he produced a document, the as-yet-unclarified Amoris, that essentially talked around the controversy, implying in various ways that communion might be given case by case, but never coming out and saying so directly.
This indirectness matters because within Catholicism the pope’s formal words, his encyclicals and exhortations, have a weight that winks and implications and personal letters lack. They’re what’s supposed to require obedience, what’s supposed to be supernaturally preserved from error.
So avoiding clarity seemed intended as a compromise, a hedge. Liberals got a permission slip to experiment, conservatives would get got to keep the letter [and spirit] of the law, and
the world’s bishops were left to essentially choose their own teaching on marriage, adultery and the sacraments – which indeed many have done in the last year, tilting conservative in Philadelphia and Poland, liberal in Chicago or Germany or Argentina, with inevitable dust-ups between prelates who follow different interpretations of Amoris.
But the strange spectacle around the DUBIA is a reminder that this cannot be a permanent settlement. The logic of “Rome has spoken, the case is closed” is too deeply embedded in the structures of Catholicism to allow for anything but a temporary doctrinal decentralization.
[Douthat seems to forget what Bergoglio announced in Evangelii gaudium that he intends to grant bishops doctrinal autonomy as he proudly affirmed how he intended to decentralize authority in the Church.
We may see the implied doctrinal decentralization in AL as a technical dress rehearsal for how Bergoglio's absurd intention to disperse or delegate papal authority on doctrine would work out in practice - even if the idea is obviously preposterous because it would splinter the Church depending on how each bishop thinks 'Catholic' doctrine ought to be, and the Church would then, in fact, lose its catholicity.
The general confusion following AL - though I hate to use the word 'confusion' for anything that results from a Bergoglian misstep, as no one is really confused about what he means, so the reaction is really disbelief that a pope could ever act or speak as he does whenever he is being Bergoglian and not Catholic at all! - is but the brief prelude to a de facto demand on each Catholic to follow his local bishop or not, in other words, to decide whether he will uphold the deposit of Catholic faith or agree instead to professing a Bergoglian anti-Catholic principle!]
So long as the pope remains the pope
[and no matter how sanctimoniously this pope claims to decentralize and/or delegate his doctrinal function], any major controversy will inevitably rise back up to the Vatican.
Francis must know this. For now, he seems to be choosing
the lesser crisis of feuding bishops and confused teaching over the greater crisis that might come (although who can say for certain?) if he presented the Church’s conservatives with his personal answers to the DUBIA and simply required them to submit. Either submission or schism will come eventually, he may think — but
not till time and the operation of the Holy Spirit have weakened his critics’ position in the Church.
But in the meantime, his silence has the effect of confirming conservatives in their resistance, because to them it looks like his refusal to give definitive answers might itself be the work of providence. That is,
he thinks he’s being Machiavellian and strategic, but really it’s the Holy Spirit constraining him from teaching error. [It is time once more to ask what Bergoglio means when he tells us that everything he has said and done since he became pope has been dictated to him by 'the Holy Spirit'. And since the Holy Spirit cannot possibly be wrong, we can only conclude that he has been erroneously transcribing/translating/interpreting what is being dictated to him, or that he mistakes the promptings of the very crafty Prince of the World to be divine rather than satanic.]
This is a rare theological hypothesis that can be easily disproven. The pope need only exercise his authority, answer his critics, and tell the faithful explicitly what he means them to believe. But until he speaks, the hypothesis is open.
Correction: November 27, 2016
This column implied that Father Antonio Spadaro had tweeted a quote from “Lord of the Rings” as a rebuke to the cardinals questioning Pope Francis. Father Spadaro has clarified that his tweet was actually directed against his own critics on Twitter.
[But the 'clarification' only came days after the tweet first came out and was then deleted a few hours later! Can we really put any faith in the pope's 'clown princes'?]
Yet here's a new papal jester. Dear Lord, not another Bergoglio fanatic in the Curia, you say? You thought Baldisseri or Paglia or Spadaro or Schoenborn are as bad as any Bergoglian bootlicker could be? Read this...
Dean of Rota warns pope could strip
Four Cardinals of their cardinalate
BY DEACON NICK DONNELLY
EWTN News, UK
Nov. 29, 2016
Archbishop Pio Vito Pinto, Dean of the Roman Rota, told a conference in Spain that Cardinal Burke and the three cardinals who submitted the DUBIA to Pope Francis
"could lose their Cardinalate" for causing "grave scandal" by making the DUBIA public.
The Dean of the Roman Rota went on
to accuse Cardinals Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner of questioning the Holy Spirit. [So Jorge Bergoglio is now the Holy Spirit???? Isn't that a stepback? He already makes like he knows better than Christ, who is of course, co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.] Archbishop Pio Vito Pinto made his astounding accusations during a conference to religious in Spain.
Archbishop Vito's indictment against the four cardinals, and other people who question Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia, was that
they not only questioned one synod of bishops on marriage and the family, but two synods, about which, "The action of the Holy Spirit cannot be doubted." [A true Bergoglian who attributes what might well be Satan's action on them as the action of the Holy Spirit!]
The Dean of the Roman Rota went on to clarify that the Pope did not have to strip the four senior cardinals of their "cardinalate", but that he could do it. He went on to confirm what many commentators have suspected that Pope Francis's interview with
Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops, was the Holy Father's indirect response
[A NON-RESPONSE REALLY, because he did not address the 5 questions and say Yes or No to each of them - five words are all that are needed to answer the DUBIA completely but he can't even do that]:
During the conference, Pius Vito made clear to those present that the Pope did not respond directly to these four cardinals, "but indirectly told them that they only see white or black, when there are shades of color in the Church."
[Ah yes, our 'fifty shades of grey' pope! But morality is always black or white - in natural law as in divine law, something is either good or bad. In the Sixth Commandment, God did not say "Thou shalt not commit adultery, unless Pope Francis or whoever allows you to do so without going unpunished!"]
The Dean of the Roman Rota, the highest canonical court responsible for marriage in the Catholic Church, went on to support Pope Francis's innovation of allowing divorced and "remarried" to receive Holy Communion.
In response to a question asking if it was better to grant divorced and civily remarried couples nullity of marriage so they can marry in the Church before they receive Holy Communion Archbishop Vito expressed preference for Pope Francis's "reform":
Pope Francis's reform of the matrimonial process wants to reach more people. The percentage of people who ask for marriage annulment is very small. The Pope has said that communion is not only for good Catholics. Francisco says: how to reach the most excluded people? Under the Pope's reform many people may ask for nullity, but others will not.
The Dean of the Roman Rota appears to be overlooking the canonical rights of the faithful, including cardinals, to make their concerns about the state of the Church known to the people of God. Can. 212 §3 sets out this solemn right and duty:
According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.
Cardinals Burke, Caffarra, Brandmüller and Meisner expressed due respect to Pope Francis and his "sovereign decision" not to respond to their DUBIA, while at the same time meeting their right and duty to communicate with the People of God.
For the Dean of the Roman Rota to warn the four cardinals that they could be stripped of their cardinalate for acting in accord with the law of the Church is oppressive.
[And utterly STUPID! Thank God even more there is someone like Cardinal Pell in the Curia, who has stepped up to the plate on the fundamental doctrinal flaws of AL where the current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith apparently sees none at all!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/11/2016 02:57]