The Bergoglian wrecking ball is relentlessly at work...KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON!
Mgr Pinto’s Texas visit:
The latest Vatican intervention in the US Church
[Or, the many ways in which the Bergoglio Vatican is pushing
AL's 'heterodoxy' on the sacraments of marriage and the Eucharist]
by Jan Bentz
March 9, 2018
A curious course on matrimony and family is taking place at the moment in the diocese of Austin, Texas. Curious because the three-day event, which began yesterday, is being led by Mgr Pio Vito Pinto, Dean of the Roman Rota – while his office back in Rome appears to have had little or no involvement in the course’s preparation.
Judging from its content, its speaker, and its somewhat low-profile nature, the course could set out to push a certain interpretation of Amoris Laetitia in the USA: one which departs from traditional Church teaching on Communion for the remarried.
The course includes talks such as:
- “The Discernment, a necessary method for this Reformation: love and crisis of marriage and family according to the Magisterium of the last two Synods,”
- “Reconciliation and the Eucharist in regard to the divorced and remarried: guidelines and orientation regarding salvation of souls,” - “The Bishop, as Master of the Eucharist and of Discernment, who sends and assists the parish priests in the search of the lost: divorced, remarried, civilly married, common life couples,” and
- “Fundamental Principles of the Reformation of Pope Francis on the canonical marriage process”.
Participation in the course is mandatory for clergy of the diocese of Austin and invites all “Bishops, Priests, Judicial Vicars (Canonists), and Permanent Deacons and lay people who collaborate with Family Life and Tribunal”.
The course seems to have been prepared by Mgr Pinto personally, since members of the Rota in Rome appear unaware that it is even happening. When contacted by the
Catholic Herald, one Rota official said that in his office he had neither heard about the course nor about its preparation.
The content of the course may be guessed from Mgr Pinto’s previous contributions.
He described the DUBIA, which asked Pope Francis to reaffirm Church teaching on the sacraments and the moral law, as “a very grave scandal”.
It is not the first time Mgr Pinto has acted as a sort of Vatican envoy on the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. In August 2017 he paid a visit to Costa Rica where he held a course for cardinals, bishops and priests from Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.
InfoCatolica reported Mgr Pinto as saying that that
“pastors cannot know the conscience of the faithful and therefore ... it is up to the person himself to discern which path he should follow within the Church.” If he did say this – and it echoes some other Vatican officials’ words on AL -
one wonders how it can be reconciled with the teaching of previous popes. [But that is of no concern to Bergoglians, for whom AL is the new 'gospel' and the word of Bergoglio outweighs the Word of God itself!]
For instance, John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith condemned the idea that the divorced and remarried, if living in a sexual relationship, could receive Communion. The CDF and the Pope taught that if the remarried received Communion anyway, “pastors and confessors, given the gravity of the matter and the spiritual good of these persons as well as the common good of the Church, have the serious duty to admonish them that such a judgment of conscience openly contradicts the Church’s teaching.”
Mgr Pinto’s travels will continue: it is understood that the Archbishop of Trujillo, Mexico has invited him to give a course on marriage in July.
Although the texts of Mgr Pinto’s Texas course are not yet available, it seems probable that he will continue to support Communion for the remarried in some circumstances.
Given that the involvement of the Rota seems limited at best, it is likely that the initiative for the Texas trip comes partly from senior Vatican figures.
This suggests that
some at the Vatican are trying to lead the US Church into a certain interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. Cardinal Blase Cupich, a close associate of Pope Francis
[if not exactly an 'associate', he is and was meant to be Bergoglio's chief surrogate in the USA], recently helped to lead three seminars for US bishops on AL.
He believes that “conscience” should ultimately determine the reception of Communion.
Cardinal Cupich’s seminars were invitation-only and closed to the media, rather as Mgr Pinto’s event has been little publicised – perhaps in order to avoid criticism of the content of the respective courses.
It is easy to see why there would be criticism. As Cardinal Willem Eijk recently warned,
“The question of whether the so-called divorced and remarried can be allowed to receive sacramental absolution and therefore the Eucharist is cracking the Church apart.” If Mgr Pinto’s course fails to reaffirm the Church’s traditional doctrine, it can only lead to more such confusion and grief.
[Quite an understatement! What does it say of the lord and master at the very heart of this poisonous web being reinforced about AL that Mons. Pinto, a wild-eyed and intemperate Bergoglio fanatic, is made to roam the world formally teaching anti-Catholic principles and practices? KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON!]
As the fifth anniversary of that unfortunate March 2013 Conclave nears, reviews of the Bergoglio pontificate are popping up everywhere. The habitually pro-Bergoglian and ultra-liberal British newspaper The Telegraph has a 'mixed' review. For all its attempts to accentuate the positive first - in sickeningly dulcet praises - the subsequent 'but...' considerations are very significant. I won't even attempt to fisk the article, but the preponderance of paragraphs that I have purpled highlights the many approving assumptions and conclusions it draws, which are typical for those who applaud Bergoglio's Church-wrecking heterodoxies and activities.
Five years after Pope Francis was elected,
how much has changed?
[When even supporters cannot give unconditional praise to a 'wrecking ball' pope
whose pro-active advocacy of all the major liberal issues hasn't quite yet wrecked the Church]
by Peter Stanford
THE TELEGRAPH
9 MARCH 2018
On his visit ‘home’ to Latin America in January, Pope Francis treated the vast crowds of Chileans and Peruvians who turned out to greet him with
what have become, these past five years since his surprise election as head of the worldwide Catholic Church, the hallmarks of an eye-catching papacy. For good and for bad.
From his debut on the world stage on the evening of 13 March 2013, when he appeared as the new Pope on a balcony high above St Peter’s Square in Rome, Francis has been firing the imagination of believers and non-believers alike with his humanity,wit and warmth, and his willingness to be more outspoken than any other Pope in recent memory. He has chosen to use the moral authority of his ancient office not to lecture the world on the dangers of sex, but rather to champion the causes of migrants, refugees, the economically marginalised and the environment.
During his trip to Peru, Francis was in his usual bold, uncompromising mood, the master of the dramatic gesture. He stood alongside Amazonian tribespeople to condemn the ‘extractivism’ of multinationals who are destroying the rainforest, and was the fearless speaker of truth to power when he launched a full-frontal attack on the ‘virus’ of corruption among politicians from a stage he was sharing with the country’s embattled president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, himself currently embroiled in a financial scandal.
Francis’s words carry extra force, inside and outside the Church, because what everyone knows about him is that he practises what he preaches. There’s his refusal, for instance, to move into the gilded papal residence, living instead in a small apartment in a Vatican guest house; there’s his preference for simple suppers around a refectory table talking to any fellow guest who happens to be passing through; and his rejection of large, luxury ‘Popemobiles’ in favour of Fiat 500s to deliver him to and from airports on his many overseas tours.
But there is another side to Francis, one less often seen, but on display later during that same Latin American trip. When challenged in Chile by journalists about his controversial decision to appoint local priest Juan Barros as a bishop, despite allegations that Barros had been involved in covering up sexual abuse of minors by a fellow cleric, Francis suddenly came over all authoritarian and snapped back at them: ‘The day they bring me proof against the bishop, then I will speak. There is not a single proof against him. This is calumny! Is that clear?’
It was an extraordinary outburst and prompted the head of Francis’s own Vatican sex abuse commission to publicly rebuke his boss ever so gently for talking of ‘proof’ rather than ‘evidence’ (only the latter, of course, is required to justify an investigation). It also added fuel to the fire of abuse survivors who argue that, for all the dazzling rhetoric about wanting to make the Church a more open and equal community, underneath it all, the Pope is just as autocratic and unfeeling as his predecessors and wants to brush survivors’ suffering under the carpet.
‘When it comes to his brother priests,’ said Mary Dispenza, a former nun who has accused her parish priest of raping her when she was seven years old, ‘Francis protects them at the cost of heaping pain and shame upon victims.’
Which of these two faces of Francis is the real one –
the charismatic reformer, determined to drag Catholicism into the 21st century by the force of his personality and the sincerity of his message, [obviously the image that the Telegraph, like the rest of the secular media, prefer to keep of Bergoglio, despite all the indicators that 'the emperor is really naked'], or the traditional Prince of the Church, whose first instinct is to protect the institution, even if that means riding roughshod over the feelings of victims of clergy abuse?
‘I am always being told by people I meet that, “You Catholics have a liberal Pope,”’ reflects Ann Widdecombe, the Tory former minister, unlikely reality TV star and convert to Rome.
‘And he is certainly very, very good at PR, which is no bad thing given how the Church is usually presented, but I always reply, “What exactly has he changed?”’
And it is true: Francis has sounded liberal, especially on same-sex relationships (‘Who am I to judge?’ he remarked early in his papacy), but
has also seemed content over the past five years for the Catechism of the Catholic Church to continue to label homosexuality, sex before marriage, contraception and abortion as sinful. [That is a most erroneous observation, because Bergoglio has certainly shown his openness to at least 'wink' at Church doctrine on these issues (AL already condones active homosexual practice and cohabitation which is the ultimate sin of pre-marital sex), even as he is moving to institutionalize so-called pastoral changes that effectively amount to doctrinal changes while insisting disingenuously that 'doctrine is not being changed'.]
‘Perhaps in 20 years’ time it will all be different, but people no longer seem to believe that change can happen in a great leap and bound. And that’s what is making them edgy,’ says Widdecombe. ‘They don’t quite know what’s going on right now. They don’t know what to make of him.’ [If Widdecombe thinks that, then obviously the circles in which she moves do not have the certainty that Bergoglio is doing the right things, otherwise they would simply say as Bergoglio supporters do that "Oh, he is so right - why didn't anyone in the Church think like him before?"]
One answer is to judge him by the goals he set himself at the time of his election. Top of the list was reform of the Roman Curia, or civil service, which stood accused of corruption on an industrial scale.
It had been the ‘Vatileaks’ scandal, an episode of Curial skulduggery involving stolen private papers and the Pope’s personal butler, that was said to have convinced Francis’s ailing predecessor, Benedict XVI, to break with 600 years of tradition that Popes must die in post and announce (in Latin) his resignation at the age of 85. [YECCCHHH! One of those spaghetti-limp reasons people bring up for Benedict's renunciation. Yet the most that the writer can say about the Vatileaks 'scandal' is that it was 'an episode of Curial skulduggery involving stolen private papers (the pope's, describing some petty machinations by those around him but none accusing him of anything) and the Pope's butler' - if there had been any genuine scandal in that skulduggery, he would have mentioned it in fingerlicking, Schadenfreude detail.]
Cue Francis, the Argentinian self-styled outsider – ‘the man from the ends of the earth’ as he described himself on the night of his election – who was going to be the one to drain the Vatican’s very own swamp. And he set to his task with apparent gusto. In his Christmas message to the Curia in 2014, he accused his own civil servants, many of them priests and nuns, of 15 ailments including ‘spiritual Alzheimer’s’, and of living ‘hypocritical double lives’. Last year, he called out among them ‘traitors of trust… corrupted by ambition and vainglory’. Reforming Rome, he complained bitterly, ‘is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinxes with a toothbrush’.
Fine words, but have they been matched by actions? ‘The reform of the Curia continues,’ says ‘Vaticanologist’ Marco Politi, who has spent 40 years observing Popes, ‘and some impressive results have been achieved. The Church’s central government has become somewhat slimmer.’ [Politi, a Bergoglio enthusiast from Day 1 if only because he was such an implacable adversary to Benedict XVI, is one of those who remain staunch to Bergoglio. BTW, how has 'the Church's central government become somewhat slimmer' with the creation of 4 new super-dicasteries, even if they do incorporate a number of former autonomous if minor agencies?]
Hardly an overwhelming endorsement, you might think, given the extent of the charges laid against the Curia. While Vatican departments have been merged, more women brought in, and those who have stood in Francis’s way unceremoniously removed – including, last year, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the German head of the all-powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the taint of scandal has not been expunged.
Two books by Italian investigative journalists –
Greed by Emiliano Fittipaldi and
Vatican Inc by Gianluigi Nuzzi, both published in 2015 – revealed a level of corruption at God’s business address on earth to rival anything imagined by Dan Brown in his Vatican-based novels.
Fittipaldi, for instance, accused figures at the Vatican’s Bambino Gesù Hospital for sick children of redirecting €400,000 from its charitable foundation to pay for the lavish refurbishment of the flat of the former secretary of state under Pope Benedict, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
[An event that occurred during Francis's Pontificate, when Bergoglio kept Bertone on as Secretary of State at least 6 months, and which Bertone has sought to clarify, though inadequately. He claims he paid for much of the work himself and then refunded some of what was claimed to have been given to him by the Foundation.] And Nuzzi lifted the lid on a culture where those who live on Vatican sovereign territory (most of them clergy) make a healthy profit out of selling on tax-free petrol and luxury goods to outlets in the rest of Italy.
[As in Vatileaks-1, neither of the examples mentioned constitutes a major scandal on the order of the Banco Ambrosiano-Mafia tie-up and the loss of 250 million euros that the Vatican had to reimburse to clients when the bank collapsed in the late 1980s.]
Those who defend Francis’s get-tough approach point out that charges have been made against many of those involved in such cases, including ‘Monsignor 500’ Nunzio Scarano, another senior Vatican official who allegedly only kept €500 notes in his wallet, and who in 2014 was in court for trying to illegally import £16.5 million in cash into Italy. [The charges and followthrough were made by the Italian government, not by the Vatican.]
Francis has also, his admirers continue, gone much further than ever before in trying to rein in what has long been the most scandalous element of the Vatican administration, its bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR). It is often mentioned as a favoured conduit for Mafia money. [For detractors of the Church, no reforms attempted and/or actually achieved by the Vatican will ever eradicate the stigma they choose to brand on the Church, whether it is that of clerical sex abuse or financial misdeeds. Thus, since the Banco Ambrosiano snafu in the late 1980s, the IOR has always been - and will always be - described as 'scandal-ridden' (shot through with scandals, as by a shotgun) -never mind if the scandal(s) have been rid of! ] In the 1980s, the Vatican was forced to pay out millions to shareholders of the failed Italian Banco Ambrosiano after the IOR was accused of complicity in the financial impropriety of Ambrosiano’s chief executive, Roberto Calvi, known as ‘God’s Banker’, who was found hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge.
On Francis’s instructions, a new team of financial experts was appointed to take control of the IOR, and given the Pope’s blessing to do whatever was necessary to bring the bank into line with international money-market regulations. Yet last November, the deputy director Giulio Mattietti, just two years in post and supposedly one of the ‘new brooms’, was swept out of his job and escorted from the building with no explanation. His departure came just five months after another official brought in to reform Vatican finances, auditor-general Libero Milone, resigned suddenly.
Their fate, Vatican insiders have suggested, is evidence that entrenched forces in the Curia are resisting Francis’s reform agenda. Milone himself has claimed he was forced out after uncovering possible illegal activity. ‘I couldn’t allow any longer a small group of powers to [defame] my reputation for their shady games,’ he told reporters. ‘I wanted to do good for the Church, to reform it like I was asked, but they wouldn’t let me.’
It’s a disturbing picture he paints, but perhaps the biggest blow for Francis’s anti-corruption drive has been the loss of his key ally, Cardinal George Pell.
His brief had been to reorganise and open up the Vatican’s whole financial system as part of a council of nine cardinals, known as C9, appointed specifically to support Francis in tackling entrenched, reactionary and corrupt elements in the Curia. All nine, like Francis, had little experience of working in the Vatican bureaucracy but plenty of time spent in the real world. [As it turned out, Pell's efforts were sabotaged by Bergoglio's one-step-forward, two-steps-backward 'reform', as powers Pell had been previously given to do his job were gradually taken away by Bergoglio, to be handed back to former powerholders on all things financial and administrative such as the Secretariat of State and the Administation for the Patrimony of the Holy See.]
Pell had been making progress – revealing, for example, millions of euros in Vatican accounts that were unaccounted for – but last summer he was forced to take a leave of absence to defend himself against charges of child sex abuse involving multiple complainants in his native Australia. (Pell denies the allegations.) A hearing is set to take place this month in Melbourne, and many people predict he may never return to Rome even if he is cleared of wrongdoing.
‘This issue of child abuse has never really gone away, however much the Church would like it to,’ says Luke Coppen, editor of the
Catholic Herald, ‘and now with the case of Bishop Barros and the charges against Cardinal Pell, it risks overshadowing whatever is left of Francis’s papacy.’
[Coppen is wrong to say that the Church would 'like' the issue of child abuse to go away - what she wants, as Benedict XVI clearly demonstrated, is for priests to stop committing these sexual sins and for bishops to stop seeking to put a lid on any cases that do arise. But this can only be done if pursued with consistency, not allowing many flagrant exceptions as Bergoglio has done.]
If reform of the Curia was the top priority for Francis, then for Catholics in the pews, the issue that has proved the greatest challenge to their faith in their Church has been its handling of child abuse by the clergy. They want more than anything to believe that Pope Francis is taking the matter as seriously as they do.
Once again, he has been saying the right things, talking up a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to abusers and those who have covered up abuse. In 2014, Francis established the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. He’d taken his time, some said, but he was applauded for appointing lay experts alongside clergy, and two members were themselves survivors of abuse by priests.
But the initiative has been slowly unravelling ever since. Of the two survivors, Peter Saunders stood aside in frustration in 2017, and Marie Collins also resigned. She cited opposition in the Curia to implementing any of the reforms the commission suggested, and the Pope’s failure to attend a single meeting during her time. It was evidence, she complained, of ‘the low priority given to this issue, despite the assurances so often given by the Pope that it has the highest priority’.
And discontent at how Francis has handled child abuse is not the only front on which he is being criticised. In 2014 and 2015, he held two synods – meetings of the world’s bishops – on the subject of family. In advance, in line with his stated vision of the Church as a community, not a monarchy dictated to by the Pope, Francis put out a questionnaire to mass-going Catholics around the world on some of the crucial issues to be covered at the synods, including the treatment of Catholics who have divorced and then remarried.
Most bishops kept the findings secret but, in those European countries that did publish the result, around 90 per cent of respondents backed dropping the current ban on such Catholics from taking communion.
Francis may have had
ordinary Catholics on his side
[would one consider the secular Catholics-in-name populating de-Christianized Europe as 'ordinary Catholics' or representative of them?] on his side, but not the majority of his fellow bishops, who greeted his enthusiasm for reform coolly.
When he pressed ahead nevertheless and handed over to local bishops the decision about changing the rules over the treatment of divorced Catholics who remarry, four cardinals accused him of undermining the Church’s moral teaching, and
few bishops have taken up their new powers. [???]
‘No Pope in 100 years has faced such opposition amid the bishops and clergy,’ says historian Andrea Riccardi.
[Riccardi has got to be fibbing - and so ahistorical for a historian! The overt opposition in word and deed to the post-Conciliar popes by 'spirit of Vatican II' cardinals, bishops, priests and theologians was far more widespread and damaging at the level of parochial life than the known opposition today to Bergoglio's heterodoxies (only a relative minority have been willing and courageous to speak up in defense of Catholic orthodoxy).
The significant difference is that whereas the post-conciliar popes were opposed for their insistence on orthodoxy (from the Greek word for 'correct thinking', it means "conforming to the Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the Church"), the opposition to Bergoglio is because of his anti-Catholic, sometimes anti-Christian, heterodoxies. And arguing for what is right and correct is always so much more forceful than insisting on error, which is all the Bergoglians can do - hence Riccardi's twisted perception.]
But if there is passive resistance from bishops, it’s hard to measure the depth of that opposition.
[One would like to think there is passive resistance and much of it, and one hopes so, but there has yet to be any serious survey made on this issue.] It may be that bishops simply dislike change, or that they are so used to having Rome tell them what to do, they are waiting to see what will happen with Francis’s proposals.
The Pope’s reaction to the criticism of the four cardinals once again revealed his authoritarian streak, though this time the flash of steel delighted liberals in the pews. He may like to be seen as listening – but not to these particular rebels, or the small but well-placed constituency of traditionalist Catholics they represent. He declined to answer the cardinals’ appeal for clarification.
Will ignoring them be sufficient to see off the opposition? Well, two of the original four rebel cardinals have since died, so there may be wisdom in his strategy. But next to the honeymoon feel of those early months of Francis’s papacy – and the high expectations they generated – doubts are now widespread about how far his reforming style may translate into lasting change.
In his early days as Pope, in one of the off-the-cuff remarks that he so likes to make and which endear him to audiences everywhere, Francis told a Mexican TV interviewer that he ‘didn’t mind’ being Pope, but had ‘the sensation that my pontificate will be short. Four or five years…’ [Awww, so cute, so endearing! He's very good at making these 'impromptu' statements clearly calculated to win gullible hearts over - and there are so many!]
Did he mean it? Might he also resign from office? As ever, the world waits to see how great the difference is between his words and his actions. [Provided his successor won't be a Bergoglian, or someone even more apostate than Bergoglio, what a magnificent blessing it would be to the Church if he meant it at all! Does anyone really believe he did?]
Allowing for his fervent disapproval and dislike of Bergoglio, Mundabor often has very sensible and realistic Catholic commentary on the topic, like this one:
The Pope in an age of madness
March 7, 2018
How, it might be asked, in these disgraceful times, can the Church be true if Francis is Pope? My answer is another question:
How can the Church be true and allow us to choose who is Pope?
Bad as this crisis is, one thing is sure: we cannot put an end to it with our own private decisions. Not only is this fully un-Catholic, it also leads to absurd consequences.
So, let's say that I and several thousand Mundaborists decide that Francis is an illegitimate Pope. Three weeks later, he proceeds to appoint nine Cardinals. Are they legitimate Cardinals? Obviously not. Then other seven Cardinals are appointed, and after that eleven more. In the meantime, hundreds of dioceses, including a dozen of major world capitals, have illegitimate bishops.
A Conclave follows: how can anyone who questioned Benedict’s 'sabdication, much less anyone who denied Francis; legitimacy, accept the new Pope as legitimately elected, even if the new pope were someone who could well be Pius XIII? And at this point, what happens? This Pope will elect new Cardinals, and the problem will become inextricable.
Now, if we had a formally heretical Pope the matter would be simpler: with God’s grace, the See would be declared vacant and however many Bishops and Cardinals are available to side with Christ would proceed to convocate an imperfect Council, declare the Pope self-deposed, and elect a legitimate one.
But again it would be them, not us, who do it. It would be up to them, not to us, to decide that the Pope has deposed himself. There is simply no mechanism within the Church based on which laymen decide who is Pope. If it were so, we would be all Protestants.
The reality is sad, but part of the sadness is this: that we will have to live with obscenely bad Popes for as long as the Lord decides that it is fitting for us to be punished with them. And when the Lord in His Goodness has decided that it is time to put an end to this, then he will let us know through signs that are in conformity with what the Church teaches: for example, by the SSPX declaring the Pope a formal heretic and calling for an Imperfect council, which then – by God’s grace – also happens, and leads to the Pope’s deposition.
To decide that the Pope is not legitimate and then unavoidably deny legitimacy to everything that happens later is like stabbing the Church in the heart to cure Her (admittedly, very bad) fever. It is, as I have written already, Sedevacantism on instalments. It is just not the way the Catholic Church and the Catholic mind work.
Take Francis as a penance and use this time to pray the Lord that He may, in His Goodness, pave a way out of it; a way which, as we all know as Catholics, will invariably be a Catholic one.
And here's Phil Lawler's commentary on a recent broadside by Bergoglio's tireless surrogate in the USA:
The accusations of Cardinal Cupich:
Name names, please
By Phil Lawler
March 9, 2018
In his latest column for the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper, Cardinal Blase Cupich — who styles himself as a champion of civil dialogue within the Church — lashes out at people who disagree with Pope Francis:
For this reason, it is not surprising that we occasionally hear voices, unfortunately often expressed in print and broadcast media claiming to be Catholic, who criticize Pope Francis for introducing topics such as discernment, dialogue, mercy, gradualness to help us understand better our Christian lives.
Is that the way the cardinal proposes to “accompany” people who are “at the margins” of the Church? By questioning whether they are really Catholic — and going on to speculate about whether their thoughts are motivated by fear or by a failure to believe in the Resurrection? But beyond that, I have two more questions:
Yes, there have been people (myself included) who protest when terms like “discernment” are used to camouflage an unwillingness to call a sin a sin, and a scandal a scandal. But those are complaints about the way these words are used — one might say misused. But who are these people who criticize the Pope for introducing those terms into the discussion? Name one.
And by the way, which of those terms did Pope Francis introduce? Cardinal Cupich himself mentions that Pope Benedict XVI spoke of “gradualness” — although the cardinal gives a highly tendentious rendering of the retired Pontiff’s thoughts on the subject. The words “discernment” and “dialogue” appear in the 50-year old dictionary on my desk. And I seem to recall reading something about “mercy” in the Bible.
Do I sound angry?
Yes, I am angry — at the tactics of those who, while speaking in lofty terms about open dialogue and respectful debate, do their utmost to impugn the motivations and question the good faith of those who disagree with them.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/03/2018 18:15]