Fr H places our beloved Pope's rigid obstinacy about not answering the DUBIA in the most charitable light he can...
Sporting the 'papal oak':
The pope obstinately locks his door
and mind to the DUBIA cardinals
June 25, 2017
I am finding it difficult to elaborate a workable hermeneutic by which to understand
the unwillingness of the Roman Pontiff to allow his door to be opened to the Four Cardinals.
It has been critically pointed out by others that he opens his door to some rather unusual applicants. This seems to me to be not at all a just object of criticism. I applaud him for it. How can anyone fail to notice that, in so doing, he is following the example of his Line Manager, the Second Person of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity? Whom did the Incarnate Word ever turn away?
But ... well, may I put it like this.
If I ran a very welcoming household, admitting anyone who knocked, friends and foes, from tramps to parliamentary candidates, talking to all, hearing their troubles, struggling with their worries, and trying to resolve their uncertainties, but refused ever to find a moment to hear and talk with my wife, children, and grandchildren, what judgements ought to be made of me?
The Lord washed the feet of his most intimate friends, and that
pedilavium was seen in the Church when Abbots washed the feet of their sons, Bishops the feet of their presbyters. But the present occupant of the Roman See refuses this service of humility to his associates and rigidly confines it to people whom he has, as far as we are informed, never met before. I am impressed by the symbolism of what he does do ... with its gracious imagery of openness to those on the social peripheries ... while being
puzzled by the determined rigidity of his exclusions.
Perhaps ... who am I to speculate? ... our Holy Father feels impatient that Four Cardinals are unable to understand his recent document Amoris laetitia. Possibly he suspects that they fail to understand because they are determined not to understand. I know exactly the same feeling. Both in the parochial teaching ministry, and in a scholastic environment, I have sometimes had that very feeling.
In my simplicity, however,
I have usually tried to devise other strategies by which to make myself understood. Should I really have just refused to waste my time? Is that the message and example we lesser people are to infer from the conduct of the Vicar of Christ?
Papa Ratzinger once invited to tea a dissident theologian with a life's history of heresy and of malevolent and unpleasantly expressed antagonism towards himself: Hans Kueng.
[He didn't have to invite him at all, but he did, noblesse oblige to his adversary once he became Pope.] I thought that was a rather fine and lovely gesture. Or: perhaps not so much a mere gesture as a real and Christ-like openness to a brother in Christ. Was I merely naive to think this? Should Ratzinger simply have locked the door, eaten all the sandwiches himself, licked his lips, and had a nap?
I can understand it if the present occupant of the Roman See has a mental list of people he would rather not meet, which includes bishops whom he has just sacked as well as the Four Cardinals. That would be very humanly and endearingly understandable. Many pastors have, at least
in petto, just such a list of parishioners. I once went along one particular street rather than another to avoid the risk of meeting such a person.
But then, in my examination of conscience, it occurred to me: suppose Providence had disposed the likelihood of such a meeting with the intention that some particular good would result from it?
I am finding it quite a struggle to discover the truly Christian and pastoral meaning in locked doors, unanswered letters, and rigid exclusions.
*Male undergraduate sets of rooms in Oxford used to have an inner and an outer door. The latter was called the 'Oak' and it was said to be 'sported' when it was shut. 'Sporting one's Oak' occurred when, in some such emergency as an Essay Crisis or a woman, the undergraduate concerned had no time for socialising.
Will Papa Bergoglio go down in the History books as the
Papa Robustus, the Oaky Pope? Will the next step of the Four Cardinals be to compose in Greek elegiacs a
paraklausithyron [literally, 'lament beside the door']
From
today, June 25, 2017, this quote of the day (my translation) without a commentary. Who would have thought what the late pope
said 47 years ago would be so frighteningly actual today? And that the non-Catholic thinking is now led by the very man who was elected
to lead the Church!
Paul VI to French writer Jean Guitton
September 8, 1977
There's a great turmoil today in the Church, and it is the faith itself which is at issue. I find myself recalling a not-often quoted statement of Jesus from the Gospel of St. Luke: "When the Son of Man comes, will he still find faith on earth?"(18,8).
There are many books these days in which faith seems to be in retreat on many important things but the bishops do not say a word, as if they do not find these books strange. And their attitude is strange to me.
From time to time, I reread the Gospel on the end of time and observe that some of the signs of these end times are emerging today. Are we near the end? We will never know. But we must always be ready, even if the end may be vary far off.
What strikes me when I consider the Catholic world is that sometimes it seems that at its very heart, a kind of non-Catholic thought predominates. And it can happen that this non-Catholic thinking may become the stronger side tomorrow. But it will never represent the thinking of the Church. It is necessary that a small flock [true to the thinking of the Church] subsists, no matter how small it may be.
Il Timone fittingly used this illustration for the quotation - fittingly because Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI would speak repeatedly of a smaller Church,
a Church made up of 'creative minorities' who would lead her to a rebirth after all the ravages of Modernism.
I have been unable to find a date for the photograph but I must assume it was taken after the then Archbishop of Munich-Freising had been made a cardinal in June 1977, because
he is already wearing a red hat. Also, I have not found any other version online of this photo but this one, which is impervious to Photobucket enhancement.[/I[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/06/2017 01:14]