TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 19 dicembre 2016 05:09
Some thoughts as the pope turns 80
by Roberto De Mattei
Translated from
December 16, 2016
Pope Francis has passed the threshold of 80:
Ingravescentem aetatem (advanced age), as defined by Paul VI's motu proprio of November 21, 1970, which imposed on all cardinals the duty to leave active office upon reaching 80 and also takes away from them the right to take part in a papal conclave.
Paul VI decreed this in order to create a Montinian curia, but thus introduced a profound contradiction to a more than millenary practice of the Catholic Church.
If indeed advanced age is an obstacle to effective leadership of a diocese or dicastery, and in fact, keeps a cardinal from taking part in a papal conclave, how is it that having reached 80, a cardinal who earlier became pope, can better bear the weight of leading the universal Church?
But these are not the considerations that led this pope to declare on December 12
[???Did he say this again recently? I thought this was from 2-3 years ago and that he has since said more than one he has no intention of resigning/retiring.]: "I have the feeling that my Pontificate will be short, perhaps four or five years... Perhaps, it won't be so, but somehow I feel than the Lord has put me here for a brief time. But it's just a feeling, so it leaves all possibilities open".
The true motivation for a possible abdication would seem to be not a weakening of his strengths but
his awareness that he is well into what Antonio Socci calls in
Libero 'the inexorable decline of a pontificate' Nov. 20, 2016).
The Bergoglio project to 'reform' the Church, with the aid of the Bishops' Synod and docile collaborators is in trouble and the balance sheet on his Holy Year of Mercy is more than just disappointing.
“Pope Francis has closed the Holy Door, ut his message is accompanied by the rumble of an underground crisis," wrote Marco Politi in
Il Fatto Quotidiano (Nov. 21, 2016).
"The conflict was opened, consciously or not, by the pope himself, especially after his exhortation Amoris laetitia, and today the Church is not going forward but is mired in terrain furrowed by the fissures of deep division."
Someone has likened the failure of Pope Francis's pontificate to that of Barack Obama's presidency. But what required eight years to happen in Washington has taken just three years in Rome - namely, the transition from the euphoria of the early days to ultimate depression for having missed the objectives that had been set forth.
But it would be wrong to read this pontificate in purely political terms. This pope would never have been able to proclaim YES, WE CAN, as Obama did. For a pope, unlike for politicians, not everything is possible.
The Supreme Pontiff has supreme, full and immediate authority over the entire Church, but he cannot change the divine law that Jesus Christ gave the Church, nor the natural law that God has impressed in the heart of every man.
He is the Vicar of Christ, but not his successor. He cannot change Sacred Scriptures nor Tradition, which constitute the remote rules over the faith of the Church. Rather, he must submit himself to them.
And this is the impasse in which Papa Bergoglio now finds himself. The DUBIA presented by the Four Cardinals to him and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have placed him at a dead end.
On his exhortation Amoris laetitia, the cardinals have asked the pope to answer clearly, with a Yes or a No, to the following questions:
- Can divorced Catholics who have remarried civilly and do not wish to abandon their objective situation of sin legitimately receive the Eucharist?
- More generally, are divine and natural law no longer absolute and can, in certain cases, allow exceptions?
The answers go to the very foundations of morality and of the Catholic faith.
If what was valid yesterday no longer is valid today, then what is valid today, may no longer be valid tomorrow. [The very core of RELATIVISM, which has now found its most presumptuous dictator in the pope himself!]
But if we admit that morality can change according to the times and circumstance, then the Church is destined to sink into the relativism of the liquid society we have today.
If that is not the case, then the pope should remove his Cardinal Vicar in Rone, Agostino Vallini, who told a diocesan pastoral convention in September that
remarried divorcees can be admitted to communion "according to a discernment which distinguishes adequately case by case".
His position has since been adopted by
Avvenire, the organ of the Italian bishops' conference, who on December 2, said in an editorial that those were
"very clear words to which the pope has given his imprimatur". [Strange expression to use - the pope (and his ghosts) wrote AL, so of course, it has his imprimatur! But not, alas, 'very clear words', as much as the Avvenire writer may wish!
But can the pope give pastors the faculty to violate the divine and natural law of which the Church is the custodian? If a pope should try to change the faith of the Church, then he renounces in an implicit and explicit manner his mandate as the Vicar of Christ, and sooner or later, must be obliged to renounce the pontificate itself.
The hypothesis of such a coup de theatre in 2017 is not to be ruled out. Voluntary abdication would allow Pope Francis to leave the field as a misunderstood reformer, who can blame the rigidity of the Curia for his failure.
And if this is to happen at all, it will probably be after the next consistory which will allow Bergoglio to put in place a majority of cardinals chosen by him as cardinal electors in order to condition the choice of the next conclave.
The other hypothesis is that of a fraternal correction on the part of
[some] cardinals which, once made public, would be equivalent to a verification of errors and heresies.
So nothing could be more wrong, in any case, then the recent remark of the pope's good friend, Cardinal Hummes of Brazil, who said,
"They are just four cardinals. There are 200 of us". Apart from the fact that fidelity to the Gospel is not measured by numerical criteria, the overwhelming majority of those 200 cardinals Hummes refers to have not taken their distance from their four brothers. Indeed, one would judge from their silence that it is from the pope that they are keeping a distance.
The first statements of support for the DUBIA raised by the Four Cardinals came from Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, emeritus President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, and by Cardinal Gerge Pell, Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy. Somehow, that 'silence' will be broken, probably not by 200, but certainly by more than four.
[Realistically, there could be a sizable Bergoglian phalanx right now within the 200, starting with Bergoglio's Grand Electors in 2013 - aka the Sankt-Gallen Mafia to which Cardinal Kasper belongs (though the rest of them have not spoken up about AL or the DUBIA so far); the new Bergoglio cardinals (classes of 2014, 2015, and 2016), notably the odious duo from the USA, Cardinals Farrell and Cupich; Cardinals Hummes, Schoenborn and Baldisseri, of course; the Bergoglio stalwarts in the Curia; and all the known progressivist cardinals like Tagle of Manila and Nichols of London. Lately, South Africa's Cardinal Napier - who won much praise for his opposition to the synod manipulations in 2014 and 2015 - has surprisingly come out not just in favor of AL but against the Four Cardinals.
In short, if it ever came to pass that anti-AL cardinals decide to draw up a fraternal correction document directed at the pope, they will most likely come up against a formidable firewall set up by the Bergoglio cardinals, each ready to pour boiling tar on their opponents from their protected ramparts.]
BTW, obviously, this is not the place to go to for any of the adulatory tributes to the pope on his birthday, but I was rather shocked at the sudden Bergoglidolatry recidivism of Fr. Raymond de Souza who in the past two years, at least, has been critical of the pope for all the right and usual reasons.
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pope-francis-at-80
Now, his birthday tribute is entitled "Eight reasons to thank God for his ministry" which retreads all the staples of Bergoglidolatry, but leading incredibly with something De Souza calls 'missionary discipleship' - this of a pope who rejects Christ's Great Mandate to "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit"...
Even allowing that one wishes everything good for a birthday celebrant, my teeth ached dreadfully all throughout reading this item - like listening to a violin that's painfully out of tune!
TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 19 dicembre 2016 17:11
Everyone in the Catholic commentariat is mostly being charitable and politically correct by not calling a lie a lie - In this case, a lie by the pope himself, on an objective fact that can be checked easily by looking into just a couple of articles from the extensive reporting on his two 'family synods'. (These articles would be the reports on the final document released by both the 2014 and 2015 synods.)
For those who do not have the time to do that, Fr. Murray in this article provides readers with the reportorial FACTS which prove the lie, but being a priest, he, of course, is careful not to say 'the pope lied', but uses the generic term 'rewriting history'.
Nonetheless, this article should be kept as a very important reference that epitomizes the sorry situation in the Church today brought on by a pope whose primary interest is his 'legacy', as Obama might say, except that a pope's only legacy ought to be upholding and defending the deposit of faith as it was handed down to him when he was elected to lead the Church, not to subvert it in every way, much less to 'create' his own articles of faith.
Does anyone remember any pope in contemporary history who has lied so publicly and repeatedly?
To compound his already grave derelictions as pope with a common lie to justify one of his most outrageous derelictions is simply too outrageous for words. The lie speaks volumes for itself.
Rewriting the history of two synods?
[Or, exposing an outright papal lie]
by Fr. Gerald E. Murray
DECEMBER 17, 2016
The now famous DUBIA sent to Pope Francis by Cardinal Burke and three of his fellow cardinals is a sincere effort to clear up what has become a crisis in the Church concerning marriage, adultery and the requirements for the worthy reception of the Holy Eucharist.
They have every right to ask Pope Francis to make clear that the teaching of the Church has not, and cannot, change. This is the heart of the matter. The Lord’s words are clear and unchangeable.
“Every one who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.” (Lk 16:18) The Church’s pastoral concern for people in marital difficulties is rooted and grounded in the truth of these words. “The truth will set you free.”
(Jn 8:32) Anything else leads into error and sadness.
Critics are dismissing this effort as opposing the Synod Fathers, and even the Holy Spirit. Austen Ivereigh, for instance, argued recently:
“Francis cannot answer the cardinals directly – although he has done indirectly countless times – without undermining that action of the Holy Spirit present in the most thorough process of ecclesial discernment since Vatican II. . . . everything in Amoris Laetitia – including the controversial Chapter 8 – received a two-thirds majority in a synod that was notoriously frank, open, and drawn out.”
Ivereigh is referring to a similar statement by the pope:
There all the bishops of the world were heard, during preparation; all the Churches of the world, the dioceses, worked. . . .It is interesting to see the rich variety of nuances, typical of the Church. It is unity in diversity. This is synodality. Do not descend from high to low, but listen to the Churches, harmonize them, discern. And so there is a post-Synodal exhortation, which is Amoris Laetitia, which is the result of two Synods, in which all the Church worked, and which the Pope made his own. . . .all that [Amoris Laetitia] contains, in the Synod it was approved by more than two-thirds of the fathers. And this is a guarantee.
Is this an accurate description of what happened at the two synods? No. Paragraphs 52 and 53 of the final report (relatio) of the 2014 Synod read:
52. The synod father [sic] also considered the possibility of giving the divorced and remarried access to the Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist.
Various synod fathers insisted on maintaining the present discipline, because of the constitutive relationship between participation in the Eucharist and communion with the Church as well as her teaching on the indissoluble character of marriage.
Others proposed a more individualized approach, permitting access in certain situations and with certain well-defined conditions, primarily in irreversible situations and those involving moral obligations towards children who would have to endure unjust suffering. Access to the sacraments might take place if preceded by a penitential practice, determined by the diocesan bishop.
The subject needs to be thoroughly examined, bearing in mind the distinction between an objective sinful situation and extenuating circumstances, given that “imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1735).
53. Some synod fathers maintained that divorced and remarried persons or those living together can have fruitful recourse to a spiritual communion. Others raised the question as to why, then, they cannot have access to sacramental Communion. As a result, the synod fathers requested that further theological study in the matter with a view to making clear the distinctive features of the two forms and their connection with the theology of marriage.
Paragraph 52 received 104 “yes” (“placet”) votes, and 74 “no” (“non placet) votes. Paragraph 53 received 112 “yes” and 64 “no” votes.
They did not receive the required two-thirds approval and thus were excluded from the final report according to the rules of the synod.
Pope Francis, however, gave instructions that the two paragraphs should be included. They were not published as an addendum with a note that Francis had ordered their publication. The only way a reader would know what really happened is by consulting the paragraph-by-paragraph vote tallies; but even then, there is no note specifying that a two-thirds majority of the voting synod fathers was needed for approval.
The votes clearly showed that two-thirds of the 2014 Synod Fathers did not choose to continue discussing the matter of Holy Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics at the Ordinary Synod of 2015.
Pope Francis disregarded all that when he decided to include the two paragraphs in the working document for the 2015 synod (Instrumentum Laboris, paragraphs 122-125). He has complete freedom to do this, of course. But their inclusion represents the pope’s own decision about what he wanted discussed in 2015.
[Most relevant to point out in this respect, as I always do, is that if he did not restore those two paragraphs, then the 2015 synod would not discuss the very agenda which he used as a pretext to call the 'family synods' (even if no one was taken in by the cosmetic label that these were synods on 'the family'). So he used his papal authority to override the synod votes on those two paragraphs - he needed to take extreme measures to preserve his extreme causes.
In the Final Report of the 2015 Ordinary Synod, the third chapter (“Family and Pastoral Accompaniment”) paragraphs 84-86, bear the subtitle “Discernment and Integration.” They touch upon divorced and remarried Catholics, particularly paragraph 86, which speaks of an “internal forum discussion with a priest,” and “fuller participation in the life of the Church.”
There is, however, no mention here of giving Holy Communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. The words “sacrament” or “Holy Communion” do not appear anywhere in these paragraphs. [Which sounds very much like, and was most probably, a compromise wording to allow the more conservative Synodal fathers to find the paragraphs acceptable. Even if the rule of thumb in interpreting any rule, regulation or law is that anything not expressly prohibited is considered allowable.
John Paul II expressly reiterated the communion ban in FC 84, but the 2015 synodal fathers agreed - and to me, this is the most inexplicable and unacceptable compromise they made - that in their citation of FC 84 in their Final Relatio, to leave out the three sentences (93 words) which contained that express prohibition.]
A two-thirds majority approved these three paragraphs. Even so, there were many votes against: paragraph 84 was approved by a vote of 187-72; paragraph 85 was approved by a vote of 178-80; paragraph 86 was approved by a vote of 190-64.
A Crux website story on the 2015 Final Report observed about paragraph 86: “Over the years, advocates of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion often have suggested that permission could be given through the ‘internal forum,’ meaning a private exchange with a priest or a bishop, so the reference to the internal forum could be read as encouraging that view, likely explaining why
it drew among the highest number of “no” votes of any section of the report. As written, however,
it’s not entirely clear that receiving Communion is the form of ‘fuller participation in the life of the Church’ to which the paragraph refers.”
The Synod Fathers who voted in significant numbers against these three paragraphs were obviously wary of what “fuller participation” meant in light of the earlier efforts to promote sacramental participation by the divorced and remarried. Their apprehensions were not imaginary.
In short, it cannot be demonstrated that two-thirds of the Synod Father at either the 2014 or 2015 synods voted for a change in sacramental discipline and a development of doctrine whereby, in some cases, people living in an objective state of adultery, who intend to continue living in such a state, may now receive Holy Communion. [Q.E.D. Jorge Bergoglio LIED.]
Oakes Spalding comes up with a very important reminder that one of this pope's closest collaborators in the 'family synods' revealed at a news conference that, in effect, Bergoglio had always intended to deceive the faithful about his real intentions regarding communion for remarried divorcees.
FLASHBACK: Pope 'joked' about using ambiguity
to get his way on communion for RCDs
by Oakes Spalding
December 17, 2016
For reasons I don't completely understand, this news item appears to have been largely forgotten. [Mr Spalding, there's an easy explanation. It is that the outrageous statements and actions from this pope have come relentlessly and daily like the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun that average mortals tend to forget what went before in their car-wreck fascination, or outrage, as the case may be, with the newest disaster.]
But I believe it is even more important and relevant now than when I first published it on May 7, 2016. The Pope and his ghostwriters designed Amoris Laetitia to be ambiguous. And this is of course why the Pope won't answer the dubia asking him to clarify it. Bergoglio believes that the only way to advance his revolution is through deceit. But oddly, as the article below reveals, his men are not bashful about admitting that:
Archbishop Bruno Forte, the Pope's handpicked Secretary for the synods on the family, recently spoke at a public presentation on Amoris Laetitia. A transcript of his remarks was published by an Italian news website on May 3rd. In turn, an English translation was just posted on OnePeterFive.
Here's the stunner from the original article:
Archbishop Forte has in fact revealed a “behind the scenes” [moment] from the Synod: jhj“If we speak explicitly about communion for the divorced and remarried,” said Archbishop Forte, reporting a joke of Pope Francis, “you do not know what a terrible mess we will make. So we won’t speak plainly, do it in a way that the premises are there, then I will draw out the conclusions.”
Reporting a joke?
That Pope Francis has intentionally used ambiguous language to advance his agenda should not come as a surprise to those who have steadily followed his pontificate with open eyes. It's perhaps not even a surprise that Francis might talk about his method with his ideological allies. What is stunning is that such a close ally would feel perfectly unabashed about reporting the Pope's little "joke" in a public forum.
These people are now utterly brazen. They brag about manipulating Catholics as Mussolini laughed about firing up the masses during his balcony speeches. But even Mussolini (as far as I know) never publicly boasted about it...
See, human as we are, this propaganda strategy works (unplanned as it may be): simply overwhelm the public with a never-ending stream of attention-getting statements and actions, each more outrageous than the preceding because they are new offenses or tend to escalate original offenses, so that we quickly forget what had gone before.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 19 dicembre 2016 21:33
That's a great title: It captures the Bergoglian justification/minimization/relativization of sin through 'accompaniment' and 'discernment'... The writer is a research student on theology at Oxford University.
While becoming a Christian, I was given a lot of space to figure out what needed to change in my life. No one handed me a stern list of my sins. No one suggested that I discern ways of minimizing the gap between my life and the demands of the gospel, either.
Traditional Christian morality, for me, was treasure hidden in a field (with map and digging implements provided), not moral nourishment force-fed to me while I was strapped helplessly to a gurney.
In a similar vein, I know priests who vocally support maintaining the prohibition on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion, though they don’t enforce it firmly in their own parishes.
Presumably, they think shaming someone in front of parishioners who don’t know their marital situation is more harmful than an unworthy communion. One can disagree with the prudence of their decision. But these supporters of traditional discipline are not the modern-day Pharisees of progressive demonology, who care only for enforcing rules.
The attitude of these priests reflects, for the most part, the historic Catholic modus operandi: on the one hand, clear and demanding moral standards, known to all (or easily discoverable by all who care to know); on the other hand, a lackadaisical approach to enforcing those standards. In other words, a preference for the Southern European approach to rules over the Anglo-Saxon model that demands law be rigorously enforced or else scrapped.
This modus operandi is delicately balanced, however. When moral standards themselves are relativized, what emerges is not a Church in which everyone simply moves on from the idea of mortal sin. It’s a Church in which remaining moral standards are increasingly contradictory.
When one group is excused from obedience to law, more exacting standards are required elsewhere, in an attempt to re-balance the mystic scales of justice —
deflecting attention to the sins of group B to excuse the sins of group A.
Consequently, the current direction in the Church is not (as conservatives fear) toward adopting progressive sexual mores, but more in the direction of
conservative Protestantism — which, for the most part, has jettisoned or twisted biblical teaching that conflicts with those aspects of the sexual revolution that appeal to heterosexual males, while ramping up the opprobrium against everyone else. While gay evangelical teens kill themselves in despair, heterosexual adults who shame them live indistinguishably from non-Christians.
The same approach is gaining a foothold in the Catholic Church.
Want heterosexual sex without its natural consequences? No need to breed like rabbits. Having an affair? We’ll accompany you while you discern how your new sex life accords with God’s will. Want to cohabitate? Your relationship might have the grace of a marriage anyway. [All those statements are, of course, attributable to Pope Francis and his relativistic mindset and practice.]
But a Google news search for “gay teacher fired by Catholic school” returns over 13,000 results.
This double standard seems well represented at high levels in the Church.
I was unenthusiastic about the 2014 Synod interim report, which spoke of welcoming the “gifts and qualities” of gay people, but it is revealing that the 2015 Synod junked this language while waving through an ambiguous compromise on the communion question. Some prelates who take a hard line on homosexuality are evidently willing to soft-pedal Catholic teaching on adultery.
Practically, it matters little whether this hypocrisy was officially authorized by the Synod or Amoris Laetitia. Post–Vatican II, faithful Catholics expended enormous energy vindicating the orthodoxy of conciliar teaching on liturgy, for example, while around them statues were smashed, altars bulldozed, and racks of clown costumes wheeled into the sacristy.
It will be the [malign, downright Satanic] spirit of the Synod [aka spirit of Bergoglio, aka name-any-malign-spirit] that the average Catholic must live with.
To call remarriage after divorce “adultery” now invites the accusation of “black-and-white” thinking, a failure to see the world in the “shades of gray” lauded by Amoris Laetitia’s self-appointed partisans. [Led most vocally and visibly by the pope.] But here’s the thing about gray: It’s dull.
Recall the story of Paul Verlaine. A major French Catholic poet of the
fin de siècle, Verlaine abandoned his wife for a homosexual affair with the younger poet Arthur Rimbaud. After a quarrel violent enough to warrant police attention, Verlaine was imprisoned for sodomy. In prison, he underwent a dramatic conversion to Catholicism, and he spent the rest of his life oscillating between periods of fervent devotion and drunken escapades with prostitutes. He was widely celebrated as an artist, not only for his frank erotic poetry, but also for what some literary critics have called the most magnificent Christian verse in the French tongue.
Imagine, however, that Verlaine had lived not in the 1870s but in the 2070s, that he had converted into a Church stripped of black-and-white thinking about sin and grace, in which priests are schooled in the arts of “discernment” and “accompaniment.”
Verlaine could then have been assisted to appreciate the positive dimensions of his relationship with Rimbaud (or of his encounters with prostitutes), relax, and let go of the rigid moral thinking that left him racked with guilt.
A twenty-first-century Verlaine would live a more respectable, bourgeois life, but he would lack the humility — the virtue —inculcated through repeatedly turning back to God. Verlaine’s life was squalid, but he lived it within a drama of sin and redemption that gave it direction and meaning; a life lived in blacks, whites, and bold colors, not shades of gray.
“Whoever believes that my faith is insincere,” Verlaine said, “does not know the ecstasy of receiving within his body the very flesh of the Lord. It is for me a delight which makes my head spin: it is a physical sensation. … [T]he last time I received Holy Communion, I felt myself instantly clean, washed of all my sins.”
Without the tug-of-war between sin and grace in the soul, this kind of experience of the Eucharist is inaccessible.
If we tried translating Verlaine’s spiritual writing into the language of accompaniment and integration, we would be exchanging great religious art (in contemplating which we understand something vital about the human condition) for soulless bureaucratic jargon.[/n]
The disappearance of the Verlaine-style “bad Catholic” from the contemporary Catholic landscape is not a sign that everyone became holy in the 1970s. It is a serious impoverishment.
Those who are forgiven little, love little. Sin is ugly, but it is part of the moral economy that makes grace intelligible. Without it, the narrative of salvation history looks somewhat ridiculous, for what do we need saving from? There can be something beautiful about the life of someone who genuinely struggles with sin instead of making excuses, and beauty is indicative of truth.
“The Catholic Church,” Oscar Wilde famously quipped, is “for saints and sinners. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.”
The Catholic Church is very much for adulterers
[in the sense that the Church is open to them, as it is open to all, but not in the sense of condoning their sin unconditionally as the Bergoglian discernment process seems to do], too (though they cannot be communicants without a firm purpose of amendment) — no matter how much the new regime may wish to redefine adultery out of existence.
It just occurred to me that in the almost eight years of Benedict XVI's pontificate, no one - not even the media - characterized his statements and actions (even those perceived by the media to be questionable) as 'Ratzingerian' the way one must characterize the narcissistic notions and obsessions of Jorge Bergoglio as supremely, distinctly, and identifiably Bergoglian. Whereas what Benedict XVI said and did was never about him, but always about Christ, the Church he left us, and the faith we have kept intact since apostolic times.
Indeed the term 'Ratzingerian' was used only to describe prelates who thought the way Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI thinks about the faith. And I recall only one detail of the pontificate that was called 'Benedictine', namely his stipulation of six candles and the Crucifix
for the Novus Ordo altar table at Mass. I, of course, did not think 'Benedictine' was the appropriate adjective form - I used the form 'Benedettian', because 'Benedictine' is reserved to St. Benedict ofNorcia, just as it would be unthinkable to say 'Franciscan' to refer to anything Bergoglian because the form 'Franciscan' should refer back only to Francis of Assisi.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 19 dicembre 2016 23:49
It's been quite some time since I posted something from our blogging Spanish monk who is quite an acerbic and rather original critic of this pope, but he does give his reasons for his pungency! And he has a gift for going beyond the specifics of an event or statement he comments on to home in on the underlying problem...
'Good vibes' Francis
Translated from
December 17, 2016
Some old people use the language, expressions and idioms du jour of young people, thinking that this will include them immediately in their circle of admiration. Similarly, some people think that the use of language which is ‘vulgar’ (i.e., in the original sense of the word meaning ‘common, popular’) and coarse will allow them to be more accepted as informal ‘simple folk’ in certain circles.
I have always thought that such adaptation masks the inferiority complex of someone who begs pardon for being different while trying to show full identification with the manners of the group being courted.
I have seen it many times in my life as a monk. Recently, I had an abbot who learned to let loose with a few swear words to get closer to the novices. Not only did he succeed to make them laugh at him (because he used the words at the wrong time, at the wrong occasion and gracelessly). But it also placed him in a position of superficiality which automatically generates disrespectful attitudes by the novices. It’s what my grandmother used to call showing who's the boss.
[The Spanish idiom is colorful - subirse a la chepa, which literally means, jumping atop a hunchback, i.e., anything to make you 'higher'.]
But when someone has a position of responsibility or represents an institution, he has to maintain dignity in his person, his ways and manners, in order not to harm the office or position in any way. Even the most stupid know this, although it tends to be forgotten by evildoers and paranoid crazies.
But I do not know how I would classify the case of Pope Francis. What's for sure is that since he came to power (surprising him, he said, because he was not expecting it at all!) has levitated the pontificate with a double revolution: one of doctrine and one of manners.
The first is the more serious and important, that which is truly destructive, which can leave everything in ruins, one of carnage and gangrene. That which many bishops are rushing to learn and support.
The second - a revolution of manners - also does its subversive work. Many Catholics who do not really understand the importance of doctrine and its annihilation, do turn to TV and the media, absorbing insolence and grossness through their eyes and ears.
From which, inevitably, it follows that a widespread impression of the papacy today is that it is rather coarse and vulgar, more fitting for a barbarian than for a saint.
There are numerous examples in the news archives of the past 3 years and seven months. They provoked the so-called 'Francis effect' and now, it seems to me that they are promoting a calamitous Francis.
We have gone through 'the club wielded by the old woman' (a reference to St. Teresa of Avila) to the papal wish of 'enjoy your meal' to end his Angelus remarks, to transparent white cassocks [calling attention to the black pants underneath] and even some deliberately frayed sleeves, to the eulogies and loving compliments to Martin Luther, and who knows what else. All in a very informal and colloquial way. Using 'very normal' words without any seeming gravity or what this pope likes to call 'rigidity.
The letter he sent this week to the mayors of Madrid and Barcelona (both women)
[apparently, the same letter the pope sent to the lady mayor of Paris, thanking her for the 'good work; she has been doing in favor of illegal immigrants. This is the only letter we have heard of before this], those two females who he probably considers icons and living examples of spirituality and love of God for Catholics and all who represent the life of the Church, is one more thing to add to the list.
Francis obviously loves tyrannical communistoid personages, well and happy with their bank accounts even it they are official denouncers of everything capitalistic. He feels at home among them. We can make a list of all the persons who have apparently most dazzled this pope and gladdened his heart.
One phrase stands out in his letter to the lady mayors:
"Pray for me, and if you do not pray, then send me good vibes".
I have to check if in the pontificate of St. Pius X, there is any similar expression, but I think not. What's that about good vibes?
And whence comes that camaraderie and familiarity he shows towards these two ladies who are examples of nasty 'blow-out' anti-Catholicism? With what casualness he tells them that his home is their home and they can come whenever they want to!
The Lord lived among the poor and sinners but it was in order to attract them to him so they could follow his road to salvation, so they would resolve to sin no more, to save their souls.
Francis, on the other hand, receives them to tell them to go ahead as you are (as if they needed to be encouraged to be who they are!), that God is merciful, that they should not pay attention to doctrinal rigidity, that we (the 'Church') will accompany you from hereon (as if they needed to be accompanied). But this is all according to what I said above.
He does not just identify with them - he prefers them to others (faithful Catholics, for example) and encourages them to go on doing as they have always done. And he does this at the expense of those who are nostalgic for Catholic tradition.
At our convent, someone said that the pope will probably write a Christmas letter to the Four Cardinals who raised the DUBIA, asking them officially to pray for him. Let us hope that the Four, instead of sending him good vibes, will send him the fraternal correction declaring how he has stepped out of Church doctrine. High time this was done!
I might as well post my translation of a piece written by Fray Gerundio last month which I did not post as I never finished translating it. As usual, he picks a relatively 'minor' event and looks at it in an original way that then raises important underlying principles...
Pope Francis's 'excluded' ones
Translated from
November 19, 2016
When Our Lord Jesus Christ said that the Kingdom of God belonged to the poor in spirit, his words were perfectly understood – and has been perfectly understood by the Church for centuries. That is, before the invention of the Bergoglian doctrine which is nothing more than 'a Marxism of the peripheries', so to speak, which came into being because of hatred for ‘others’ who are not them.
But now with the new hermeneutic prevailing at the Vatican, the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount is being interpreted in a new way. They do not stop talking about ‘the excluded’ and how they must be ‘welcomed’. Of course,
the moment the excluded are included, then they are no longer excluded – does that mean we no longer have to worry about them?
[I have posed this Bergoglian conundrum in earlier remarks in these terms: For JMB, the very fact of being poor means that one is virtuous and free of any sin (in which case they did not and do not need Jesus or any religion to redeem them), in contrast to the ‘non-poor’ who are necessarily devoid of any virtue and sinful. So what happens when the poor move up and are no longer poor – do they suddenly lose all their virtue and become sinful like every human being is (except in Bergoglio’s neverland)?] So once more, ‘space is superior to time’, as our Buenos Aires Einstein likes to say.
Even if that talk about including and not excluding sounds very good indeed, what is sure is that when something is included, something else is bound to be excluded. At least in classical mathematics, even if not so in the accounting of politicians, parties, and the gang denouncing capitalist sins who are the shameless utopians of our day.
I bring this up because of the news report of an event which was so exquisitely prepared and realized - the so-called Jubilee of the Homeless and the Mass said especially for them by the pope recently.
The report says more than 4,000 homeless people came to the Vatican from all over Europe. It was interesting to see them as they enjoyed the instant when they could touch the hem of Bergoglio’s cassock as he processed among them with, strangely, a face that seemed to be a bit sour. “Come to me, you who are blessed by my Father, you who have been excluded by the Capitalist System”.
And in order to underscore his theme of mercy, to make his audience more self-aware of who they should direct their rage at, the pope asked their forgiveness in his homily.
He asked for forgiveness of Christians who look at poor people and then look the other way. The more there is progress, the more there is exclusion, said the Oracle of Casa Santa Marta.
Whereas I, a monk little-schooled in economics, believe instead that
the more there is progress, the more it is possible that many homeless will find work; that if there is no economic progress, there is no work, and if you are unemployed, you may well find yourself homeless. Fray Peseta, who understands these things, corroborates this.
I have commented many times that
Bergoglio wants to make us believe that in the Church – and in Christianity, in general – nobody every thought about the poor until he came along. There is some truth in that, which I hasten to qualify: Nobody has shown so much concern about the poor as he does, because
no pope has made the poor (those excluded from the capitalist system) a populist and electoral standard to brandish on TV.
The Church has always taken care of the poor without great ado, almost without the left hand knowing what the right hand does, and without needing the slogans of Marxist utopians.
The Lord was well aware of the fact of poverty, and so he said, “The poor you will always have among you (but you will not always have me)”.
[There is an irreplaceable priority – Jesus first, then everything else will follow (or as Benedict of Norcia expressed it, “Never place anything ahead of Christ!") - that JMB ignores habitually because he is so obsessed about material poverty.]
This project to end poverty once and for all is a utopia. It is true that Marxism ended the poverty of millions of human beings, but that was mostly by killing them off. And yet, our pope tells us that the communists were the best Catholics there ever were in the universe.
I commented to my brothers in the convent that these 'excluded', once they arrived at the Vatican, were no longer ‘the excluded’. They all were able to come to this celebration because they knew someone, they had some connection, they had a recommendation, and someone spent for their trip. As one can see from the Vatican video, all of them – almost all, anyway – carried a cellphone with which they took ‘selfies’ as the pope passed by. Surely this was because each one with a cellphone also knew someone who lent them the phone for the occasion. Because, I say, if they are homeless, then they should also be phoneless, right? Meanwhile, priests forced to wear grubby albs and stoles would probably be listed among the shampoo-less, and are ontologically self-excluded.
But to tell the truth, the authentic excluded ones are the poor people who could not be among these privileged 4,000 somehow brought to Rome for the occasion. The real excluded ones know no one important, no one invited them to Rome, no priest-friend urged them to go, no papal office offered them the possibility to travel to the Eternal City. They were the uninvited. No one thought to bring them to Rome. They remained completely excluded. So one must deduce from mathematical logic that not all ‘the excluded’ were included for this event. Or to put it another way, there are VIPs among ‘the excluded’ [and now have become ‘included’]. So we see the great farce of the Demagogue-on-Duty.
When the Lord told us the parable [likening the Kingdom of Heaven to the house of a king who sent his servants to the main roads to bring in all the poor, the lame, the disabled to his son's Wedding Banquet [after all those he had originally invited found excuses not to come to the feast], the king made much of the fact that each guest should come properly dressed. To the point that when he saw a guest who did not have the right wedding garment, he had him taken to prison.
Did Francis and his mariachis even consider whether these selected homeless were truly Catholics before giving Holy Communion in such a coarse mercantile way as one can see from the video?
Because whereas in the exercise of charity, one does not have to ask who is who,
the Sacrament of the Eucharist does require us to approach the Lord in clean clothes - the ‘wedding garment’ that Francis seems to want to discard, if we are to judge by his theology lessons and criteria of ‘truth’ in that inspired document called Amoris laetitia.
Bergoglio’s garment shop would seem to offer only Tarzan’s loincloth. And his thinking is shared by all those faithful lapdogs preparing to receive the cardinalate and wear garments of red, symbol of martyrdom. Rome does pay traitors well these days.
And since we are on the subject, let us talk about another papal visit to a special class of ‘excluded’. This time, to their homes and, of course, before TV cameras. When the Supreme Pontiff decided to make home visits to ex-priests who had left the priesthood and become family men: To encourage them move ahead in their chosen path. To bless and kiss their wives and children. Was it to ask their forgiveness for something?
[But they left the priesthood voluntarily, in those peak years when priests left by the thousands to get married.]
Aren’t the excluded ones instead those priests who remained faithful to their holy orders despite enormous difficulties? Or, is it that in the atmosphere of Bergoglian mercy, those who did not betray their vocation do not deserve a word of encouragement and praise for their fidelity? What was the underlying mercy in this apparently innocuous visit?
Yet for now,
the Four Cardinals who have asked him for answers about his ambiguous doctrine that places the faith at great risk are excluded. He purports to ignore them, will not look them in the face
[he could have done so if he did not cancel the full consistory usually held at the time of a cardinal-making consistory, but he chose to cancel that full assembly], and shows he despises them by his very silence.
He does not dare answer their questions directly and clearly. I think they should have passed themselves off as Swedish lesbian bishops to present the questions to him directly. He would have called them on the phone and asked them to come visit immediately.
A good thing that the Holy Year of [Selective] Mercy is coming to an end. Fray Malachi is happy because now he thinks it will be followed by a Holy Year of Justice. May it be so!
TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 20 dicembre 2016 02:09
December 19, 2016 headlines
EXCLUSIVE: Cardinal Burke suggests timeline
for ‘formal correction’ of Pope Francis
by Lisa Bourne
December 19, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews, Cardinal Raymond Burke has given an indication of the possible timeline of a “formal correction” of Pope Francis should the Pope not respond to the five dubia seeking clarity on Amoris Laetitia, presented to the Pope by four Cardinals, including Cardinal Burke.
“The dubia have to have a response because they have to do with the very foundations of the moral life and of the Church’s constant teaching with regard to good and evil, with regard to various sacred realities like marriage and Holy Communion and so forth,” Burke said during a telephone interview.
“Now of course we are in the last days, days of strong grace, before the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord, and then we have the Octave of the Solemnity and the celebrations at the beginning of the New Year - the whole mystery of Our Lord’s Birth and His Epiphany - so it would probably take place sometime after that.”
The cardinal, who is the patron of the Sovereign Order of Malta, said the format of the correction would be “very simple.”
“It would be direct, even as the dubia are, only in this case there would no longer be raising questions, but confronting the confusing statements in Amoris Laetitia with what has been the Church’s constant teaching and practice, and thereby correcting Amoris Laetitia,” he said.
The exhortation has caused widespread
confusion since its release in April, largely due to its ambiguity on important moral questions.
[I think the word 'confusion' is being bandied around carelessly and misused to refer to the situation in the Church today - which is clearly marked by an abysmal division between the representatives of Catholics who abide by the deposit of faith that has been kept by the Church and her popes for more than 2000 years, and those, led by the pope himself, who think it is not just their prerogative but also their duty to tinker with that deposit of faith and make changes that will make 'the Church more responsive to the world' but which really constitutes an accommodation to the world. Both sides know with great certainty where they stand. No confusion there. The battle lines are clearly drawn. And a battle it must be.
But the abyss between the opposing sides is chaos - actual chaos among the faithful who have been following this Manichean battle since March 13, 2013, and that best hews close to 'confusion' for those who are unable to decide which side to take, but infinitely worse chaos for the majority of the world's Catholics, generally heedless of Church developments which occupy Vatican-watchers daily, but whose lives will be touched profoundly by the consequences of this battle. The outcome would be calamitous for the Church and the faith if the Bergoglians prevail, and infinitely challenging for the orthodox if Catholic right and reason prevail, because it will mean trying to rebuild and normalize a Church brought to the verge of destruction by anti-Catholic forces wielded by an all-powerful pope.]
This has caused various bishops as well as bishops’ conferences to interpret the document, at times, in ways that are at odds with Catholic teaching on marriage, sexuality, conscience, and reception of Holy Communion. For example, the bishops of Buenos Aires and Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego have interpreted the document as allowing civilly divorced and remarried Catholics who are living in adultery to receive Holy Communion in certain cases. The Pope himself wrote to the Buenos Aires bishops to praise their guidelines, saying there was “no other interpretation.”
Cardinal Burke, along with Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Carlo Caffarra, and Joachim Meisner, submitted the DUBIA, five yes or no questions, in September seeking clarity from Pope Francis on whether the exhortation conforms to Catholic moral teaching. When the Pope did not issue a response after two months, the cardinals released the DUBIA publicly. It was after this that Cardinal Burke disclosed that a formal act of correction would be necessary, if the Pope refused to clarify the meaning of his exhortation.
While such an act of formal correction is something rare in the life of the Church, it is not without precedent.
Pope John XXII in the 14th century was publicly challenged by cardinals, bishops, and lay theologians after denying the doctrine that the souls of the just are admitted to the beatific vision after death, teaching instead that heaven is delayed until the general resurrection at the end of time. Pope John eventually recanted his position, due in part to a joint letter from theologians from the University of Paris that professed total obedience to the pope while making it clear to him that his teaching contradicted the Catholic faith.
Burke called the procedure of correcting the error of a pontiff a “way of safeguarding that office and its exercise.”
“It’s carried out with the absolute respect for the office of the Successor of Saint Peter,” he said. [And the office is not the person who occupies it, who may be saint or sinner, wise or not, Catholic or anti-Catholic (which is what we have now).]
TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 20 dicembre 2016 02:54
Amoris Laetitia and everything after
December 19, 2016
Time for another intervention on matters Catholic, I’m afraid. Last week Austen Ivereigh, author of a very fine Pope Francis biography and frequent defender of the pontiff against conservative critics, wrote a piece for Crux announcing that
the debate over “Amoris Laetitia” and communion for the remarried is essentially over, [Hah! Just because he says so does not make his statement true, or real, or even plausible!] that intransigent conservatives are now as much “dissenters” from the papal magisterium as any liberal agitating for the ordination of women under John Paul II — and that long after the cardinals questioning Francis are no more “than a footnote in the history of this papacy, long after Ross Douthat’s predicted schism from the columns of the New York Times has failed to materialize, the next generation of priests will be applying the magnificent teaching of ‘Amoris Laetitia,’ and the noisy, angry strains of dissent will have faded into a distant memory.” [These days, all I have to do is see Ivereigh's name on anything, and I want to throw up! And this after simply reading snippets of his sickening sycophancy and La-La-Land delusions about Bergoglio and his pontificate. I do not think I could read a full article and not have a fit of apoplexy.]
Since my predictions in this strange year in Western history do not exactly have the finest track record, I will not offer a detailed counter-prophecy. But let me suggest a few ways in which why
his argument does not seem to fully fit the realities of Catholic divisions at the moment.
First, Ivereigh’s insistence on the total clarity of “Amoris” and the Holy Spirit-driven theological consensus it allegedly reflects seems to be shared by relatively few ecclesiastics – which is why the overwhelming episcopal response to the cardinals’ questions, their dubia, has been a circumspect silence rather than a rush to rally ‘round the pope. [Other than by predictable unregenerate Bergoglidolators!]
It may be that “Amoris” means exactly what Ivereigh says it means – a “yes” to communion for the remarried confined to extremely rare circumstances, basically, if I’m reading his interpretation right. But the text (very obviously and deliberately) doesn’t just come out and say that, and,
pace Ivereigh and many others in the papal inner circle, the two synods decidedly did not either.
Which is why we can have equally-reasonable-seeming interpretations of the document that vary by geography and ideology, ranging from the more-liberal-than-Walter Kasper approach in San Diego to the conservative (“dissenting”?) approaches in Poland and Phoenix and Portland and Philadelphia, with more cautiously liberal approaches, à la the pope’s own Argentina, most likely in many places in between.
Now perhaps some sort of organic bottom-up process will eventually sort all these disagreements out; perhaps every bishop who takes the conservative line will pass away and be replaced by a moderate or liberal, and in fifty years perfect consensus will prevail through a purely biological solution.
But more likely Rome will at some point be required to rule more clearly on precisely the issue that Ivereigh asserts is settled, finished, closed,
[as the ideologues, including this pope, mindlessly trumpet about catastrophic manmade climate change!] and in need of no further commentary – because until Rome rules, not only surly, noisy lay Catholic scribblers in rich countries (as he, a lay Catholic scribbler from a rich country, describes the pope’s critics) but actual bishops of the church will probably continue treating the questions raised by the dubia as open and debatable, and the answers suggested by the two synods and the papal exhortation as ambiguous in the extreme.
Moreover: if it really is the case (I don’t think it is, but for the sake of argument let’s accept the claim) that so-called dissenters from “Amoris” are in roughly the same position as dissenters on various issues under John Paul II, isn’t the lesson of the Francis era for papal critics precisely the opposite of the “game over, guys” lecture that Ivereigh offers us? Namely, that despite all the official talk about how when Rome speaks the case is closed, what’s declared “over” in the church isn’t actually over if a new pope decides that the Vatican’s answer ought to change.
Ivereigh conjures up a plangent image of anti-papal dissidents, liberal then and conservative now, who “take refuge in their progressive or traditionalist liturgies and incandescent websites, firing off letters and petitions from lobbies and associations, vainly demanding, as ‘faithful Catholics’ that the pope do this, that, or the other … But even as they insist that there is a debate to be had, a case to answer, a matter to be settled, the train is leaving the station, and they are left on the platform, waving their arms.”
Yet throughout the Francis era we have seen precisely the people who were seemingly “left on the platform” under John Paul II – progressive theologians, ecclesiastics, lay petitioners – suddenly ushered into the engine room and asked for their advice in steering the locomotive.
So if that can happen so easily – if a matter “settled” by papal authority when Cardinal Kasper raised it twenty or thirty years ago can be reopened and relitigated under Francis, with a novel conclusion that leaves yesterday’s progressive dissenters plainly feeling vindicated and invigorated – then why should conservatives feel particularly concerned about the label of “dissenter” now?
If you seek to make the church less of a tradition and more of a party, you can’t expect that label to carry the same sting. If yesterday’s Kasper, slapped down by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for proposing exceptions to the no-communion-for-the-remarried rule, can be today’s Robert McElroy, empowering his priests to give communion to most or eventually all of the remarried, then there is no reason for any conservative (or traditionalist for that matter) to assume that the wheel can’t turn again.
Especially since it is so very obvious that the underlying moral-theological issues in “Amoris Laetitia” are relevant to a host of other controversies, which means that to declare this debate “settled” is to ignore all the other ways it promises to unsettle Catholic discipline and doctrine for many years to come.
Writers like Ivereigh who argue for a basic continuity between (their interpretation of) “Amoris” and the prior papal magisterium tend to be loath to engage on this point, but the evidence is right in front of us – and not just on sexual ethics, where same-sex couples, polygamists and unmarried straight couples can all reasonably claim that the most liberal interpretation of “Amoris” applies to their situations as well.
There are also implications for Catholic-Protestant intercommunion, where Walter Kasper is busy arguing that Lutherans should be able to receive the Eucharist and where the pope’s own hints suggest agreement.
And there are implications – which I confess I hadn’t fully contemplated – for how and whether the church opposes the advance of euthanasia, now taking hold in North America and spreading well beyond the terminally ill in parts of once-Catholic Europe.
Indeed, the exact same post-“Amoris” pattern that we’ve seen on second marriages and the sacraments is playing out presently in Canada with assisted suicide. The bishops in the western provinces are taking the traditional line that Catholics who are planning their own suicides can’t be given last rites, because you can’t grant absolution to someone who intends to commit the gravest of sins shortly afterward … while the Catholic bishops of the Maritime provinces, citing Pope Francis’s innovations as a model, suggest that actually pastoral accompaniment could include giving last rites to people who are about to receive “medical assistance in dying,” because every case of assisted suicide is different and who are we to judge?
In other words, thanks in part to the pope and to “Amoris,” we now have two different implicit teachings from two different groups of Catholic bishops on a literal matter of life and death. And saying “the train has left the station” and labeling one camp of bishops the “dissenters” – which, on the issue of euthanasia, I don’t think Ivereigh would do – tells us exactly nothing about how this conflict ought to be resolved.
None of this means that the ultimate resoluti0n(s) will actually satisfy conservatives. Again, I will make no predictions on that score. But the understandable desire to “turn down the heat” and have things simply go back to semi-normal in the church, which informs Ivereigh’s “the case is closed” case and has informed my own commentary in the past, seems now very unlikely to be satisfied.
The fact is that what’s happened with the synods, with “Amoris” and now with the subsequent divisions is a very big deal – not just big for this pontificate, but big in the context of Catholic history, in which open theological conflicts between cardinals and the pope simply do not come around very often.
The columnist’s temptation is always to overdramatize, yes … but I think it’s silly to deny that this is now a genuinely historic theological controversy (Jesuit-Jansenist level, at least, if not quite Arian-Athanasian) or else a crucial hinge point in the larger age of controversy that came in with Vatican II.
The papacy that Ivereigh has dedicated himself to celebrating [UNCONDITIONALLY] may be remembered as a watershed moment for reform, or it may be remembered for ushering in a crisis of orthodoxy – but either way, while Francis has probably guaranteed his own historical significance, the conflict that will determine what kind of significance he’s earned has only just begun.
While Douthat considers the eventual outcome of this pontificate still open-ended, Antonio Socci in his reflections on the pope's 80th birthday appears to think - or has convinced himself, in any case - that this Pontificate is already in decline...
The pope at 80:
Driven into a blind alley on the faith,
he still has his political agenda
And the global Left now consider him their counterweight to Trump
Translated from
December 17, 2016
"I am allergic to adulators", Pope Francis said recently in an interview on TV2000, adding that he prefers his critics and even his detractors to the adulators. [This has to be, at best, a rather gross white lie!]
He explained: "We in Buenos Aires call them lecca-calze (An Italian term that literally means sock-licker, which sounds more gross somehow than bootlicker. But since I wanted to be sure of this, I googled the term and was shocked that it turned up any number of porn sites in which the term appears to describe a lesbian sex act, so perhaps the Argentines use it in the sense of asslicker. But this is exactly what Fray Gerundio means by Bergoglio's tendency to get too crassly colloquial! Though he did disguise his recent poop talk with erudite Greek-derived terms about abnormal obsession with excrement. Yet I wonder how this earthy language sits with those it applies to - the privileged coterie of courtisans surrounding the pope at Casa Santa Marta who know they are first-rate bootlickers - both out of genuine adulation, perhaps, as well as in the interests of keeping their privileges.]
But do you think the Argentine pope has done anything in the past almost four years to distance himself from such adulation? His 80th birthday will doubtless lead all of media in predictable celebratory tributes (and certainly adulatory), but some will also come out with assessments, and they may be sort of like a final-season assessment.
A bit because 80 is the canonical age for which the Church has decreed that all cardinals must leave their official positions and lose the right to take part in a papal conclave.
It does not apply to the pope, of course, but in some way, the question is up in the air, because if at 80, a cardinal is deemed no longer qualified to vote in a Conclave, then the problem should be even much more serious in the case of a pope and his manifold responsibilities.
Also because following the still recent renunciation of Benedict XVI, Pope Francis has repeated many times that the retirement of a pope should henceforth be considered as natural as that of bishops, who are required to retire at age 75. And he has also said that he has 'the feeling that my pontificate will be brief, maybe four or five years". [Not that anyone really believed all that grandstanding. In fact, he later said he has no intention of resigning, which I believe he repeated two days ago.]
Moreover, there has been a geopolitical upheaval in the world, especially with the election of Donald Trump and the exit of the Obama presidency which had been the imperial framework for this pontificate (as we saw during his visit to the USA last year when, totally out of place, he went on the attack against then-candidate Trump).
So there will be balance sheets of two types. On the one hand, that of certain secular personages, like Eugenio Scalfari, who consider Papa Bergoglio as 'a revolutionary and prophet', and even "the only revolutionary pope in history".
On the other, certain Catholics who, precisely because of this (the pope's revolutionary ambitions for which he seems to want to demolish everything in the Church), consider him a genuine disaster who has been shaking the Church to her foundations.
But there can be a third possibility. Between those who see Bergoglio as an alter Christus (another Christ) (but even more merciful than Jesus, because he is attacking the rigorous commandments of the faith) and those who suspect he is a kind of anti-Chrsit, there is a third school of thought.
Those who see him as a 'poor Christ' [And what might a 'poor Christ' be? A hobo who has to sleep on a park bench?] who has been placed - by various forces - in a role far above his personal possibilities. And those who brought him to his position expected him to open the Church to the world, by which they mean that he would bring down the 'walls' of the Church so that her enemies could freely conquer.
And he - with limited theological knowledge and an approximative formation at best, impregnated moreover by the Argentine version of liberation theology - thinks (or wants to think) that this would be a way to relaunch the Christian faith, ignoring the fact that wherever the Marxist formula has been tried, it has ended tragically in failure.
Motivated by great activism and a certain authoritarian manner (as he admits it of himself), he believes he is the man who will bring about an irreversible turning point in the history of Christianity, but the result he has obtained so far is to have brought the Church into a devastating doctrinal and pastoral chaos, causing explosive divisions within the Church which have not been seen before.
In a fantasy account which has just been published in Italian, the French anthropologist Marc Auge imagines Easter Day 2018, which falls on April 1, when Pope Francis will appear on the central loggia of St. Peter's Basilica to announce urbi et orbi that God does not exist and has never existed.
Such a fantasy would have been unthinkable about any other pope, but of Bergoglio, the secular world has come to expect even something as extreme as this. Because, in effect, he has said enough here, there and everywhere, that only that final articulation needs to be added.
An announcement which is really not far from the upsetting statement he made to Scalfari in their first conversation in 2013: "There is no Catholic God". [Yes, I know he probably meant that God is God for everyone, regardless what religion you profess. Which is not, of course, confessionally true. But Scalfari, for all his Jesuit upbringing, apparently didn't bother to remind the pope that only Christians believe in a Triune God, which is what the average layman would consider 'the Catholic God' - and is certainly not the single-person God worshipped by the Jews, or the Allah of the Muslims.]
Since when, we have been asking, "What then does Bergoglio represent?", but above all we ask, why should Catholics go to church at all? (especially since moreover, during the years of this pontificate, Catholic religious practice has been in free fall).
Since that interview published on October 1, 2013 - even leaving aside the other unheard-of ideas attributed to him by Scalfari [about sin, conscience, hell, etc], the staggering statements made by the Argentine pope have followed one upon another in a crescendo that has now turned the Catholic world topsy-turvy, obliging four authoritative cardinals to intervene publicly in order to call on the bishop of Rome to clarify or correct some of the most fundamental statements on doctrine and morals that he makes in Amoris laetitia.
(Indeed, most Catholics do not know that a pope cannot say or dowhatever he wants, but that it is his duty to reaffirm and defend Catholic doctrine only and always, not his personal opinions, and especially not when these opinions are heterodox as are Bergoglio's.)
In recent days, he has expressed more of this. Last Sunday, speaking to an audience of sick people, he said: "Is God unjust? Yes, he was unjust with his own Son whom he sent to the Cross."
Many Catholics thought this was blasphemous like his other previous personal interpretations of the Gospel. It is better to treat such statements benevolently, i.e., to think that they simply represent faulty understanding on his part, while recognizing the continual hazard of blundering by someone who - with little theological knowledge and lacking spiritual depth - dares to speak off the cuff on every occasion even on the most sensitive topics.
Including, of course, his habitual derision and attacks on Catholics who are faithful to the deposit of faith, about whom he has developed an infinite lexicon of insults.
His targets are, above all, those bishops and cardinals who, faithful to their duties, are seeking to help him get back on the doctrinal track, especially with the now famous DUBIA about statements in Amoris laetitia on which are causing great disquiet and chaos among the faithful.
Bergglio has refused to answer the cardinals' call for clarity and has instead reacted with inexplicable harshness. Evidently, in this case, he prefers his adulators instead of those who are respectfully asking him these grave and obligatory questions.
Some Catholic intellectuals have written that the situation in the Church today is so serious as to resemble the Arian crisis of the fourth century, when, thanks to the support of the Emperor, the Arian heresy won over almost all of the bishops in the Catholic world and the true Catholic faith seemed in danger of being swept away. The comparison appears excessive. [It is not and can't be, if only because in the 4th century, the world was not the global village it is now with instant worldwide dissemination of information 365/24/7, the impact of such a crisis is immediately global.][colore]
But confusion is spreading [perhaps not confusion as much as unprecedented disquiet and concern], and one has the sensation that Bergoglio has been boxed into a blind alley, and will not speak to the Church which is asking him to confirm the People of God in their faith.
What's left to him are the political items on his agenda, for which the 'NoGlobal' left considers him the leader. Andrea Ricciardi, one of his adulators, wrote in Corriere della Sera yesterday that - in opposition to Trump - "Francis represents the alternative reference point: from ecology to immigration and the economy".
So the Mass is over, but there's still politics.
On his blog two days ago, Sandro Magister reveals two other recent faux pas of a pope who appears each day to be getting more intemperate and verbally incontinent, to say the least...
A couple of papal faux pas
in one off-the-cuff address
L'Osservatore Romano only published the prepared text of the pope's address to the community of the Bambino Gesu pediatric hospital at a special audience in the Aula Paolo VI on Thursday, Dec. 15.
Which, however, the pope had abundantly replaced with his improvisations as immortalized on the full video of the event broadcast by CTV.
Of these improvisations, what made news was the pope's nth denunciation of 'corruption', but not a couple of his off-the-cuff statements one more disconcerting than the other.
He said the first one as soon as he took the microphone.
"Good day. First of all, I must apologize for receiving you this way, a bit like seeing you behind the scenes in a theater, or like receiving you in the kitchen - with all this apparatus on stage which will be used for a concert on Saturday. But you can see that those in charge of the concert have started work too early, eh? Excuse me because this is not a proper way to receive others".
But what was the apparatus he was complaining of [and apologizing for]? The stage behind him was set with the platforms, seats and music stands for the chorus and orchestra that were to give the concert. [It is not as if these were stacked up or in disarray. 'Not a proper way to receive guests', indeed!]
Headlined by the singer Claudio Baglione, the concert was sponsored by the Vatican Gendarmerie to raise funds for two beneficiaries: a pediatric hospital in the Central African Republic, which will be managed by Bambino Gesu, and a children's care center in the central Italian region recently struck by earthquakes.
The day before, the concert organizers had already presented the pope the first 500,000 euros they had raised from donations. And another 500,000 euros more was to be presented to him, besides the proceeds from the benefit concert.
And that was how he thanked them!
The second egregious improvisation went like this:
"I am told that the hospital needs more space. But Dottoressa Enoc (Mariella Enoc, president of the hospital) had a great idea to solve that. Which is to go to the Urbaniana [the Pontifical Urban University run by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith] for your additional space. I trust in the obstinacy of Dr Enoc that she may go ahead with her plans because there are so many beautiful spaces at the Vatican."
The pope was giving his opinion on the expansion plans of the hospital which is located next to the Urbaniana ['Oh, great. Just expand into the property of the Urbaniana!']
At this papal sally, the heads at Propaganda Fide must have broken into a cold sweat, as well as those at the Vatican Governatorate.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 20 dicembre 2016 19:50
J.D. Flynn is a canon lawyer from Nebraska but appears more theologically grounded on the subject of suffering than the pope or his copycat bishops.
I hope that Martin Scorcese’s
Silence, premiering this week, will accurately capture the genius of Shusako Endo’s novel. The novel is a meditation on evangelization, the intimate dialogue of prayer, and the imperfect alignment of Christianity with Western culture. And one of its themes in particular makes it timely, in view of the challenges currently facing the Catholic Church.
At its pivotal moment,
Silence’s protagonist, the Jesuit missionary Sebastian Rodrigues, faces a terrible choice: He can hold fast to orthodoxy, or he can repudiate it and thereby alleviate the serious, immediate, and temporal sufferings of a people he has come to love. As he contemplates these alternatives, Rodrigues must discern whether he is being guided in conscience by the Lord, by his own psychology, or by more diabolical voices.
Much of the debate surrounding Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia explores the same questions. Should the Church revise her theology in order to alleviate suffering? Is there a tension between truth and mercy? What does it mean to accompany the sinful, to be pastoral among the broken? The recent discussions began with marriage, but this month, in response to a pastoral letter of Canadian bishops, it segued into euthanasia.
R. R. Reno summarizes the substance of the pastoral letter.
Ten Canadian Catholic bishops have issued guidelines and directions affirming, as Reno says, that “it is permissible, perhaps even desirable, for a priest to anoint a Catholic who is about to receive a deliberate, self-willed, death-dealing dose of medication.”
This affirmation is tragic. To suggest that the Church can, by accompaniment, usher believers into suicide with a sacramental endorsement is inconsistent with Catholic moral theology. The Church stands against suicide, in all circumstances, because she believes that life is sacred and that
death, though it must be accepted, can never be proposed or endorsed as a solution to the problem of suffering.
We should not assume that the Canadian bishops have made their error due to malice or a willful denial of the Gospel.
Most likely, their error arises from earnest compassion (tragically misdirected), and from a popular but sloppy trend in moral and pastoral theology.
In
Silence, Rodrigues entertains the possibility of apostasy because he is tormented by the suffering of his people. Their pain, and their problem, seem to him the basic facts of his situation.
His theological reasoning is anthropocentric: He sees men with a true problem, and then begins an inquiry into possible resolutions of that problem. Some resolutions are consistent with the deposit of faith, and some are not.
Rodrigues has trouble making these distinctions, however, because he thinks that love requires that he alleviate the suffering of other people. He instrumentalizes his theological training in order to find ways to bring about their satisfaction.
Sound moral theology, fides quarens intellectum, begins with understanding real things, most especially divine things, and then drawing conclusions about behavior, discipline, and comportment. Good pastoral practice arises from sound theological principles; actions are responses to truths.
But the Canadian bishops, and many others in the Church today, seem
to begin with a desire to ameliorate suffering, and to draw conclusions about divine realities from anthropocentric pastoral practice. “We know a just God would not want anyone to suffer,” the anthropocentric theologian seems to say, “and therefore God must permit certain choices.”
The Canadian bishops say that “the pastoral care of souls cannot be reduced to norms for the reception of the sacraments or the celebration of funeral rites.” They’re right about that. Faithful moral theologians need to guard against reductionism.
But a robust vision for pastoral care needn’t be understood as a repudiation of Catholic moral teaching. True pastoral care for souls begins with knowing the Creator of every soul, and knowing his nature, and knowing his desire for human hearts and human lives. True pastoral care is attentive to suffering, and tender, gentle, and patient with those in agony.
But real pastors are not messiahs —
they know that they cannot end suffering, nor should they try. [Because even Christ, the Messiah, didn't end poverty or hunger, disease or death, and natural catastrophes, which are, by divine decree, among the inexorable and just consequences of the Fall, consequences which, in many cases, appear to man to be random and unjust (like the classic question, why does a child die of cancer) but who are we to question the ways of God? The Father sent his Son to offer eternal salvation that would enable souls to regain in heaven the lost Eden of God's original plan for man.]
They know instead that true pastoral care helps to unify our suffering with that of the Suffering Servant, who redeems us, and sanctifies us, and strengthens us to suffer with dignity in truth, as Christ himself suffered silently, conquering death upon the cross.
That a Christian must learn to accept his suffering, whatever it may be, as his participation in the suffering of Christ, to be offered to God, was a concept Benedict XVI often taught. But in the church of Bergoglio, a church of Nice-and-Easy, it seems taboo to speak about suffering at all, and the pope, on two occasions when he was asked about why innocent people suffer could only answer, "I don't know. We can only pray."
On the other hand, he takes every occasion to blame the suffering of the poor, the disadvantaged, and immigrants on the injustice and inequality of the economic system, and on the indifference and selfishness of the rest of the world. Yes, there are those social and human factors to consider, but first, man must accept that suffering is an inherent and inexorable part of life.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 21 dicembre 2016 17:01
Here is a commendable presentation of the AL-generated crisis in the Church, in the light of whether Pope Francis is to be considered heretical at all, compared to three popes who have been judged by history to be heretical, even if two were not formally heretical but deemed to be materially heretical, and one retracted a heretical teaching. I disagree with some of the writer's statements, but that does not lessen the power and clarity of his presentation as a whole.
At this point, I think I speak for 'ordinary Catholics' if I say that Bergoglio's heresy or non-heresy is not the main point at issue, and to dwell on that is to be technical and miss the most important issue, his relation to the truth: Is he truthful or untruthful (or even just half-truthful) about fundamental things that are essential to the Catholic faith?
Edward Feser (born 1968), the writer of this lengthy article is an American professor of philosophy who has written at least eight books touching on faith and metaphysics, including one on Aquinas, and notably, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, in 2008. Born Catholic, he professed atheism for 10 years until his graduate studies in philosophy led him to return to the Church.
His title is a variation on the wordplay "Denial is a river in Egypt" from "The Nile isn't just a river in Egypt", but Feser further plays on the title of a post-Vatican II book,The Rhine flows into the Tiber, about how central European theologians sought to impose their progressivist views on Vatican II.
Denial flows into the Tiber
by Edward Feser
from his blog
December 18, 2016
Pope Honorius I occupied the chair of Peter from 625-638. As the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia notes in its article on Honorius, his chief claim to fame is that “he was condemned as a heretic by the sixth general council” in the year 680.
The heresy in question was Monothelitism, which (as the Encyclopedia notes) was “propagated within the Catholic Church in order to conciliate the Monophysites, in hopes of reunion.” That is to say,
the novel heresy was the byproduct of a misguided attempt to meet halfway, and thereby integrate into the Church, an earlier group of heretics.
The condemnation of Pope Honorius by the council was not the end of the matter. Honorius was also condemned by his successors Pope St. Agatho and Pope St. Leo II. Leo declared:QUOTE]
We anathematize the inventors of the new error… and also Honorius, who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted...
Honorius… did not, as became the Apostolic authority, extinguish the flame of heretical teaching in its first beginning, but fostered it by his negligence.
It is uncontroversial that Honorius was (as the second quote indicates)
at the very least guilty of failing to reaffirm orthodoxy in the face of the Monothelite heresy, and it is commonly held that,
at least materially even if not formally, he was guilty of the heresy himself.
The eminent Catholic theologian Abbot John Chapman, writing in the Dublin Review in 1906, judged: QUOTE]
Unquestionably no Catholic has the right to deny that Honorius was a heretic… a heretic in words, if not in intention… It would no doubt be uncharitable to regard the Pope as a “private heretic”; but his letters, treated as definitions of faith, are obviously and beyond doubt heretical, for in a definition, it is the words that matter.
This passage is quoted by Dom. Cuthbert Butler in his 1930 book
The Vatican Council 1869-1870 (p. 370), in the context of noting the sorts of considerations that guided the Fathers of Vatican I when they formulated the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Honorius’s error did not conflict with papal infallibility as the Fathers defined it, because
his problematic statements vis-à-vis Monothelitism were not proclaimed ex cathedra. (Abbot Chapman reiterated his judgement in the Catholic Encyclopedia article quoted above, of which he was the author.)
Pope John XXII occupied the chair of Peter from 1316-1334. Catholic historian James Hitchcock judges in his
History of the Catholic Church that
John is “the clearest case in the history of the Church of a possibly heretical pope” (p. 215), the heresy in question in this case being the denial of the doctrine that the blessed in heaven immediately enjoy the beatific vision after death.
The Catholic Encyclopedia describes the controversy caused by John XXII as follows:
Before his elevation to the Holy See, he had written a work on this question, in which he stated that the souls of the blessed departed do not see God until after the Last Judgment. After becoming pope, he advanced the same teaching in his sermons.
In this he met with strong opposition, many theologians, who adhered to the usual opinion that the blessed departed did see God before the Resurrection of the Body and the Last Judgment, even calling his view heretical. A great commotion was aroused in the University of Paris when the General of the Minorites and a Dominican tried to disseminate the pope's view there…
Before his death [the pope] withdrew his former opinion, and declared his belief that souls separated from their bodies enjoyed in heaven the Beatific Vision.
As the passage indicates,
the pope recanted his error, and did so precisely as a consequence of the vigorous criticism raised against him by theologians of the day.
Pope Liberius occupied the Chair of Peter much earlier than either of these popes, from 352-366.
He was pope at the height of the Arian crisis, and under duress temporarily acquiesced to an ambiguous doctrinal formula of dubious orthodoxy, and to the unjust condemnation of St. Athanasius – so that it was Athanasius, and not the pope, who would come to be known to history as the chief upholder of Trinitarian orthodoxy.
As the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, St. Jerome accused Liberius of “subscribing to heretical wickedness.” But as John XXII would centuries later, Liberius repented of his error, and as with John and Honorius, his problematic actions were not incompatible with papal infallibility as it was defined by Vatican I.
Now, as the Catholic Encyclopedia also notes, “historians and critics have been much divided as to the guilt of Liberius.” But what matters for present purposes is that, as the Encyclopedia goes on to observe, “it should be carefully noted that the question of the fall of Liberius is one that has been and can be freely debated among Catholics.”
For there is nothing in the Catholic understanding of the papacy that rules out the possibility that Liberius was indeed guilty of what he was at the time accused of. The same thing is true of the cases of Honorius and John XXII.
Occasionally one finds Catholics, zealous to uphold the honor of the papacy, who argue that the failings of these popes have been exaggerated. But nothing in Catholic teaching about the papacy requires one to accept such arguments. The question is purely historical, not doctrinal. For the Church herself has never claimed that a pope cannot fall into heresy when not teaching ex cathedra.
Indeed, Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) held that “only on account of a sin committed against the faith can I be judged by the church” – a statement which presupposes that
a pope can indeed sin against the faith, i.e. with respect to matters of doctrine.(Innocent’s statement is quoted in J. Michael Miller, The Shepherd and the Rock: Origins, Development, and Mission of the Papacy, at p. 292.)
The Church has for centuries allowed among theologians free discussion of the possibility of a heretical pope. Cajetan, Suarez, and Bellarmine are among the eminent theologians who have entertained this possibility and debated its ramifications. (Canon lawyer Ed Peters offers a primer on the matter.) Once again to quote the Catholic Encyclopedia:
[An] exceptional situation might arise were a pope to become a public heretic, i.e., were he publicly and officially to teach some doctrine clearly opposed to what has been defined as de fide catholicâ.
In this case many theologians hold that no formal sentence of deposition would be required, as, by becoming a public heretic, the pope would ipso facto cease to be pope. This, however, is a hypothetical case which has never actually occurred…
In an earlier post I discussed in some detail the conditions under which a pope speaks infallibly, the many ways a pope may fall into error when his words do not meet those conditions, and many further examples of popes who have fallen into error and done grave damage to the Church.
As I emphasized,
one cannot properly understand the authority of the pope and the doctrine of papal infallibility unless one also understands the limits of papal authority and the ways in which a pope is fallible.
I have quoted extensively from the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia for a reason.
There is a certain kind of well-meaning but overzealous and under-informed Catholic whose theological horizon does not extend beyond the debates that have riven the Church since Vatican II. When you tell him that it is possible for a pope to fall into doctrinal error, his hackles rise and he assumes that you simply must be either a Lefebvrist traditionalist or a dissenting theological liberal.
As the example of the Catholic Encyclopedia shows, nothing could be further from the truth. The Encyclopedia predated by many decades Vatican II and the progressive and traditionalist movements that arose in reaction to it.
It was an ecclesiastically approved work by mainstream Catholic scholars loyal to the Magisterium, and intended to be a reliable resource for the faithful. And it quite matter-of-factly allows for the possibility of popes committing doctrinal errors when not speaking ex cathedra.
Nor is the possibility of correction of the pope by his subordinates some post-Vatican II progressive or traditionalist novelty. As Cardinal Raphael Merry del Val wrote in his 1902 book The Truth of Papal Claims, responding to caricatures of the doctrine of papal infallibility:
Great as our filial duty of reverence is towards what ever [the pope] may say, great as our duty of obedience must be to the guidance of the Chief Shepherd, we do not hold that every word of his is infallible, or that he must always be right. (p. 19)
After noting that St. Paul “had resisted even Peter” and then recounted this resistance in the Letter to the Galatians, the cardinal says:
Even today a Bishop might… expostulate with a Pope, who, in his judgment, might be acting in a way which was liable to mislead those under his own charge, and then write to his critics that he had not hesitated to pass strictures upon the action of the successor of S. Peter… The hypothesis is quite conceivable, and in no way destroys or diminishes the supremacy of the Pope.
And yet an individual Bishop does not occupy the exceptional position of St. Paul, a fellow-Apostle of the Prince of the Apostles. Even a humble nun, St. Catherine of Siena, expostulated with the reigning Pontiff, in her day, whilst full acknowledging all his great prerogatives.(p. 74)
As Ed Peters argues,
one ought to be very cautious about accusing Pope Francis (or any other pope) of heresy. But one need not think the pope guilty of heresy to see that there are some striking parallels between the current controversy over Amoris Laetitia and the historical events summarized above.
Honorius and Pope John XXII faced criticism and resistance as a result of statements perceived to be doctrinally problematic -- in Honorius’s case, from the bishops of his day (at the sixth general council) and in John XXII’s case, from the theologians of his day.
Similarly, Pope Francis faces criticism and resistance as a result of statements perceived to be doctrinally problematic – from the four cardinals, the forty-five theologians, Grisez and Finnis and other 'new' natural lawyers, and other bishops, theologians, and Catholic philosophers.
Some claim that Amoris contains heretical statements. Others do not go that far, but do claim that some of the document’s statements are dangerously ambiguous between heterodox and orthodox readings. Still others avoid focusing on deficiencies of the document itself and merely ask for clarification and for a condemnation of errors which are being, or might be, propagated in the name of the document.
But
all of these critics are agreed that, one way or the other, the pope has generated a doctrinal crisis and needs to resolve it.
A second parallel: The errors of which Pope Liberius and Pope Honorius were accused stemmed from ambiguous doctrinal formulations intended to accommodate those resistant to orthodoxy and thereby to reintegrate them into the Church.
In the case of Liberius, the ambiguous language he temporarily consented to was meant to mollify the Arian heretics, and in the case of Honorius, Monothelitism was meant to mollify those sympathetic to the Monophysite heresy.
The trouble is that these ambiguous formulations essentially gave away the store to the heretics.
Similarly, Pope Francis is accused of trading in ambiguities in the interests of “accompanying and integrating” Catholics who do not accept the Church’s teaching on divorce and remarriage. And
the problem, the critics hold, is that Amoris’s way of accommodating these dissenters makes of that teaching a dead letter, or even implicitly contradicts it.
A third parallel between the cases has to do with the motivations of the parties in question.
With Liberius, Honorius, and John XXII, it can hardly be flatly asserted that any of them intended to teach heresy. On the contrary,
- Liberius was clearly acting under duress;
- Honorius, as the Catholic Encyclopedia suggests,
“was not a profound or acute theologian, and… allowed himself to be confused and misled”; and
- John XXII was willing to listen to his critics and to reconsider his teaching.
Their intentions did not prevent them from facing severe criticism, though, because (as Chapman put it above)
“it is the words that matter” where doctrinal statements are concerned.
Similarly, the critics of Pope Francis mentioned above are not or need not be accusing him of intending to contradict past teaching. Indeed,
doctrine does not seem to be something the pope is especially interested in. [A fact that is in itself highly problematic for a pope!]
When making statements having theological import, Francis often seems less concerned with how doctrinally precise they are than with how his statements might be pastorally useful, or with how rhetorically striking and thus thought-provoking they might be.
The trouble is that, whatever one’s purposes when speaking or writing, the specific words one chooses always have certain logical implications, whether or not one is aware of or would welcome all of those implications.
[More importantly, a pope has no business making doctrinally imprecise statements, and to do so is supremely irresponsible.]
Hence, Pope Francis’s critics too have insisted that
“it is the words that matter,” whatever the intentions behind them. And
some of the pope’s words seem to be interpreted even by some of his own defenders in ways that simply cannot be squared with traditional Catholic teaching.
For example, as the
Catholic Herald has noted, Pope Francis’s friend and advisor Fr. Antonio Spadaro appears to claim in a recent interview that Amoris Laetitia teaches that “it may not be practicable” for some Catholics living in an adulterous union to refrain from sexual intercourse, and that such Catholics may persist in this adulterous sexual relationship if they “[believe] they would fall into a worse error, and harm the children of the new union” if they refrained from sex.
Now, if – I repeat, IF -- this is really what Fr. Spadaro is asserting, then he is essentially attributing to Amoris the following two propositions:
(1) Adulterous sexual acts are in some special circumstances morally permissible.
(2) It is sometimes impossible to obey the divine commandment against engaging in adulterous sexual acts.
[Spadaro was simply affirming the conclusions drawn by any ordinary Catholic reading Chapter 8 of AL once he has cut through the Gordian tangle of casuistries hedging them.]
But these propositions flatly contradict irreformable Catholic teaching. Proposition (1) contradicts not only the perennial moral teaching of the Church, but the teaching of scripture itself. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
Adultery refers to marital infidelity. When two partners, of whom at least one is married to another party, have sexual relations – even transient ones – they commit adultery. Christ condemns even adultery of mere desire. The sixth commandment and the New Testament forbid adultery absolutely. (Paragraph 2380)
Proposition (2) contradicts the decrees of the Council of Trent, which declare:
God does not command impossibilities, but by commanding admonishes thee to do what thou canst and to pray for what thou canst not, and aids thee that thou mayest be able...
If anyone says that the commandments of God are, even for one that is justified and constituted in grace, impossible to observe, let him be anathema.
Now, again, perhaps Fr. Spadaro did not mean to assert or imply the propositions in question. But that is what his remarks seem to be saying on a natural reading, and it is not obvious what else he could have meant.
Perhaps, even if he did mean to assert or imply these propositions, he is mistaken in attributing them to Amoris. But he is very close to the pope, so that it would be odd if even he misunderstood what the pope was saying. Nor has the pope issued any disavowal of Fr. Spadaro’s remarks.
Then there is the fact that the Argentine bishops’ directive for implementing Amoris also appears to be saying that “living in continence” – that is to say, refraining from sexual intercourse -- “may not, in fact, be feasible” for some couples living in an adulterous relationship, and that the couple “would fall into a subsequent fault by damaging the children of the new union” if they did so refrain. The directive seems to be saying the same thing Fr. Spadaro appears to be saying. And in this case, not only has Pope Francis
not rejected the Argentine bishops’ interpretation, he has
warmly endorsed it.
This does not entail that Pope Francis really is committed to propositions (1) and (2) or to any other proposition that contradicts Church teaching. After all, in a now famous interview with Fr. Spadaro three years ago, the pope said that while he has “not spoken much about” the Church’s controversial teachings vis-à-vis sexual morality, nevertheless
“the teaching of the church… is clear and I am a son of the church."” [Which has since seemed increasingly questionable, as he becomes more and more the progenitor and firstfruit of the church of Bergoglio.]
The trouble is that if the pope would reject (1) and (2), then it is simply not clear exactly what Amoris is teaching, especially if the Argentine bishops’ interpretation is correct, as the pope has said it is. There is cognitive dissonance here that needs to be resolved.
[Let's not forget the one time that he did say YES to a question on AL, even if the question was journalistic and not framed as a dubium:
Suppose I say: “All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man.” Suppose you respond: “Oh, so you think that Socrates is mortal?” And suppose I indignantly reply: “I never said that!” but also refuse to deny that Socrates is mortal or even to address the question of his mortality one way or the other, and also refuse to explain exactly what I did mean when I said that Socrates is a man and that all men are mortal if I wasn’t intending to imply that Socrates is mortal. Naturally, you would be very puzzled and want some clarification of what is going on.
And it would only make things worse if I stomped my foot and insisted that what I had said was already perfectly clear, accused you of rigidity and bad faith in pestering me with such questions, etc. I was the one who caused the problem, because I was the one who initiated the conversation and said something to you that would ordinarily be taken to imply that Socrates is mortal. Hence
the burden is on me to explain what I meant, not on you to try to figure it out for yourself.
Now,
the four cardinals, the forty-five theologians, and the other critics of Amoris are essentially simply asking the pope to resolve just this sort of cognitive dissonance.
Notice that in the scenario I just painted, you would not necessarily attribute ill will to me. You might instead just conclude that I am very confused. Similarly
a critic of Amoris need not go so far as to accuse the pope of intending to teach heresy. The critic can instead suppose that, as the Catholic Encyclopedia says of Honorius, the pope is merely “not a profound or acute theologian, and [has] allowed himself to be confused and misled.” [Except that in this case, it seems it was JMB himself who initiated the confusion and its consequent misleading - all the rest have simply been his mini-me's venturing to be even more Bergoglian than Bergoglio, actually saying an unconditional YES to the first dubium and implicitly though never explicitly denying the four other dubia which have to do, in effect, with abandoning absolute morality.]
The main difference between the current situation and the earlier cases described above is that
the problem with Amoris is in fact not limited merely to one or two problematic propositions like (1) and (2). The four cardinals, the forty-five theologians, and Grisez and Finnis have asked the pope to condemn a whole series of heterodox propositions that might be or have been defended in the name of Amoris – propositions concerning worthiness to receive Holy Communion, the existence of absolute moral norms, the possibility of eternal damnation, and so on. By contrast, with Liberius, Honorius, and John XXII, what was at issue in each case was essentially only a single problematic proposition.
If all that makes the current situation sound serious, that is because it is. Yet there seems to be, in certain sectors of the Church, an air of unreality or make believe surrounding the crisis. With the honorable exception of Rocco Buttiglione
[whose defense was at best token, because his arguments about the dubia were specious and thin], defenders of Amoris have not even attempted to respond to the substance of the four cardinals’ questions.
They have instead resorted to abuse, mockery, and threats – all the while claiming to champion mercy and dialogue. They assure us that the four cardinals and others who have raised questions about Amoris are comparable to rigid and legalistic Pharisees and acting contrary to the gentle mercy of Christ. Yet as a matter of historical fact it was the Pharisees who championed a very lax and “merciful” attitude vis-à-vis divorce and remarriage, and Christ who insisted on a doctrine that was so austere and “rigid” that even the apostles wondered if it might be better not to marry.
Others suspect that there is something wrong, but refuse to express their concerns on the assumption that a Catholic must never say anything that might seem to imply criticism of a pope. They simply refrain from thinking or talking about the crisis, or they do so only when they can put a positive if tortuous spin on some problematic statement, or they badmouth as disloyal those who raise even politely expressed worries. “We are at war with Eastasia, and always have been!
(George Orwell in 1984)... "We are through the looking glass!"
(i.e., in a Neverland beyond Alice's mirror)"... "Denial is just a river in Egypt!”)
Several reasons are often put forward for taking these various attitudes toward the crisis. All of them are bad. Let’s consider each one and what is wrong with it:
1.
“To ask the pope for a Yes or No answer misses the point.”
Some defenders of Amoris seem to think that the problem with critics of the document is that they are demanding Yes or No answers, when the pope’s whole point is that Yes or No answers are not possible in this case. The idea seems to be that those asking the pope for clarification of Amoris are like the lawyer who asks a witness “Are you still beating your wife?”, where the witness will look bad either way he responds.
But this is not a serious objection. There is a Yes or No answer to the lawyer’s question, and if the witness is not and never was beating his wife, then the right answer is “No.” If the lawyer is fair, he will allow the witness to go on to say “No, but I was never beating her in the first place.” But whether he allows this or not, it is simply not the case that neither Yes nor No is the correct answer. After all, the question corresponds to the declarative sentence “You are still beating your wife,” and if the witness is not and never was beating his wife, then that sentence is false (rather than being neither true nor false).
Similarly, if Amoris is not asserting either proposition (1) or (2) above, then there is no reason not to say so explicitly, even if one thinks that further comment is necessary beyond saying so. For example, the pope can say “No, of course adulterous sexual acts are never under any circumstances morally permissible, but…,” and then go on to explain exactly what Amoris is asserting if it is not asserting proposition (1).
Now, it is true that the four cardinals’ dubia are formulated as simple Yes or No questions. The cardinals are indeed asking for a Yes or a No, without further commentary.
But there is nothing stopping the pope from answering them in a “Yes, but…” or “No, but…” fashion if he prefers. To suppose that the only options facing the pope are either responding with simple and unqualified Yes or No answers, or not responding at all, is itself to commit a False Dichotomy fallacy.
2.
“Those who support the four cardinals are dissenters from Church teaching.”
In response to the four cardinals’ dubia, Austen Ivereigh proclaims:
Roma locuta, causa finita est – “Rome has spoken, the matter is closed.” Hence
those who continue to raise questions are, Ivereigh suggests, “dissenters” from settled teaching, comparable to those critics of Pope John Paul II who “argued for women priests, an end to mandatory celibacy and an opening in areas such as contraception.”
There are several problems with these claims. First,
the reason there is a controversy in the first place is precisely because Rome has not spoken.
Consider again the scenario I described above, wherein you ask me if I am asserting that “Socrates is mortal” and I refuse either to confirm or deny that I am. It would be ridiculous for me to accuse you of dissenting from my assertion if you keep asking me to clarify it. In fact, what you are doing is trying to find out what my assertion is in the first place. Until you know that, the question about whether you agree with it or dissent from it cannot arise.
Similarly,
what the four cardinals and other critics of Amoris are doing is asking the pope to explain exactly what he is saying. They can hardly be accused of dissenting from what he is saying if they aren’t clear about what it is.
A second problem with Ivereigh’s position is that
it is simply not the case that anyone who raises critical questions about some statement that comes from the Magisterium counts as a “dissenter.” The Church herself tells us so. The 1990 document
Donum Veritatis [The gift of truth], issued by then-Cardinal Ratzinger while acting as Prefect of the CDF under Pope John Paul II, states:
The willingness to submit loyally to the teaching of the Magisterium on matters per se not irreformable[i.e., reformable] must be the rule. It can happen, however, that a theologian may, according to the case, raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents of magisterial interventions…
The possibility cannot be excluded that tensions may arise between the theologian and the Magisterium... If tensions do not spring from hostile and contrary feelings, they can become a dynamic factor, a stimulus to both the Magisterium and theologians to fulfill their respective roles while practicing dialogue…
The preceding considerations have a particular application to the case of the theologian who might have serious difficulties, for reasons which appear to him wellfounded, in accepting a non-irreformable magisterial teaching…
If, despite a loyal effort on the theologian's part, the difficulties persist, the theologian has the duty to make known to the Magisterial authorities the problems raised by the teaching in itself, in the arguments proposed to justify it, or even in the manner in which it is presented.
He should do this in an evangelical spirit and with a profound desire to resolve the difficulties. His objections could then contribute to real progress and provide a stimulus to the Magisterium to propose the teaching of the Church in greater depth and with a clearer presentation of the arguments…
So, the Church herself tells us that respectfully raising questions about the form or content of some magisterial statement, and indeed even the existence of “tensions” between the questioning theologian and the Magisterium, can be a “stimulus” to the Magisterium to provide a “clearer presentation” of her teaching, “greater depth” in understanding, and “real progress.” Indeed, the critical theologian can even have a “duty” to make known to the Magisterial authorities the problems he sees in the teaching.
Now, far from constituting “dissent,” the criticisms raised by the four cardinals, the forty-five theologians, Grisez and Finnis and others, seem in tone and content to be textbook examples of what
Donum Veritatis is talking about.
The action of the four cardinals also seems to be a textbook example of the sort of thing Cardinal Merry del Val was talking about when (in the passage quoted above) he wrote that
“even today a Bishop might… expostulate with a Pope, who, in his judgment, might be acting in a way which was liable to mislead those under his own charge.”
A third problem with Ivereigh’s remarks is that
there is an obvious and crucial difference between the four cardinals on the one hand and those “dissenters” who call for women priests, contraception, etc. on the other. The latter reject the perennial and irreformable teaching of the Church. The former are trying precisely to uphold the perennial and irreformable teaching of the Church.
But that brings us to a further assumption that some defenders of Amoris seem to be making:
3.
“If the pope says it, it can’t be contrary to traditional teaching.”
Some Catholics seem to judge that Amoris simply must be unproblematic precisely because it was issued by a pope. Hence they dismiss a priori all criticisms of the document, whether or not they have any way of answering those criticisms. But there are several problems with this attitude.
First, as we have already seen,
the Church herself acknowledges that there have in fact been popes guilty of doctrinal errors, and she has never denied that it is possible in theory for a pope to fall even into heresy when not speaking ex cathedra.
And again,
Donum Veritatis allows that magisterial documents can under certain circumstances be deficient in form or content. Hence there is no basis for judging a priori and dogmatically that Amoris simply must be consistent with past teaching or otherwise free of any deficiency.
Second, the Church explicitly teaches that popes are not permitted to teach just any old thing they like, and in particular that they cannot contradict what has been handed on and cannot make up new doctrines out of whole cloth.
The First Vatican Council taught that:
The Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.
[A citation Fr Hunwicke never tires of reminding his readers!]
The Second Vatican Council taught in
Dei Verbum that:
The living teaching office of the Church… is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully…
Pope Benedict XVI taught that:
The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law… He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down…
It is incumbent upon him to ensure that this Word continues to be present in its greatness and to resound in its purity, so that it is not torn to pieces by continuous changes in usage.
Now, there would be no point in making statements like this if it weren’t the case that
a pope in theory could (even if he should not) say something at odds with traditional teaching.
If everything a pope said were ipso facto consistent with tradition, then he would never need to consult past teaching, or his advisors, in order to decide what to say. He could just teach whatever popped into his head and – Voila! – you’d automatically have “traditional” teaching.
That brings us to a third problem, which is that
supposing that a statement can be made consistent with traditional teaching simply by virtue of being uttered by a pope would force Catholic claims about the papacy into a No True Scotsman fallacy. The claim that popes never contradict past teaching would become utterly unfalsifiable.
Even if a pope explicitly denied the doctrine of the Trinity, Catholics would have to insist, absurdly, that such a denial must “really” be consistent with past Trinitarian teaching given that a pope said it.
(A similar fallacy is committed when people play fast and loose with Newman’s concept of the “development of doctrine,” as they sometimes do when they want to paper over what is really a rejection of past teaching.
To say that Catholic doctrine can “develop” means that implications of existing doctrine that were previously only implicit can be made explicit. It does not mean that past teaching might be reversed or contradicted and that this is OK as long as we slap the label “development of doctrine” on it.
That would not be a “development” of doctrine in Newman’s sense at all, but
an abandonment of doctrine.)
4.
“But there is a way to read Amoris that really is plausibly consistent with traditional teaching.”
Philosopher Rocco Buttiglione thinks that Amoris can be read in a way consistent with past teaching, and his opinion certainly carries [some] weight. Perhaps he is correct. But whether or not he is,
it is important to emphasize that it is not good enough for a document to be readable in a way that is consistent with tradition if that requires ignoring what seems to be the plain meaning of the text, or even if the text permits the orthodox reading but also permits some other, heterodox reading.
In fact it isn’t always all that difficult for a statement to pass that sort of test. For example, take the statement “God does not exist.” Surely, you might think, there is no way to read that statement consistent with traditional Christian teaching! But in fact there is, if you strain hard enough.
You could argue, in Paul Tillich style: “Ah, but what that really means is that God is not merely one existent thing among others, like a stone or a tree. He does not merely ‘have’ existence the way that other things do, but rather he just IS Being Itself. So, there is no inconsistency in believing in God while denying that God ‘exists’ in the sense of merely ‘having’ existence the way other things do!”
The right answer to that, of course, would be: “That’s all well and good, but it remains extremely misleading to make the point by saying ‘God does not exist.’ For obviously the most natural way to read that statement is as an expression of atheism, rather than as an expression of some sophisticated form of theism. And that is
how the average listener is bound to take it [which is really the commonsense test for determining the immediate perception and reception of the statements in AL Chapter 8], so that if you don’t want people to think you’re an atheist, you’d better not go around tossing out remarks like ‘God does not exist.’”
In the same way,
in Catholic theology it has always been understood that doctrinal statements can be severely deficient even if there is some way to give them an orthodox reading. That is why the Magisterium of the Church and Catholic theologians have traditionally recognized a variety of theological censures.
In particular,
a statement may not be strictly heretical, but nevertheless might be condemned by the Church on some other grounds – for example, on the grounds that it is “
ambiguous", or “
offensive to pious ears", or “
scandalous”, or “
dangerous to morals” (to cite some of the categories).
One reason for this is that
statements that are not necessarily strictly heretical but nevertheless ambiguous or in some other way potentially misleading can give aid and comfort to heretical views. Another reason is that
the average person does not have the education or appreciation of nuance that the theologian has.
If a churchman says, for example, that sometimes “it may not be practicable” to avoid adulterous sexual intercourse and that a person might even “fall into a worse error, and harm the children of the new union” if he tries to avoid it, then the average listener is bound to conclude that that churchman is saying that it is sometimes OK to commit adultery, even if this is not what was meant.
The average Catholic might be led into sin by a statement even if the statement could in theory be given an innocent reading by someone sufficiently clever.
Furthermore,
even if an interpretation like Buttiglione’s is plausible, what matters at the end of the day is not what Buttiglione says, but what Pope Francis says. And Pope Francis at least seems to endorse readings like Fr. Spadaro’s and that of the Argentine bishops – readings which, the critics of Amoris have argued, are not orthodox.
The only way to clarify the situation, then, is for the pope himself to put forward or endorse some orthodox interpretation, whether Buttiglione’s or some other interpretation.
5.
“Criticism of the pope should not be made in a public way.”
Some maintain that even if Amoris is defective and even if the pope ought to clarify things in the way the critics are asking, these critics should not be saying so publicly. They should either try to make their concerns known in some private fashion, or maintain a reverent silence.
Now, it is certainly true that some of the public criticism of Pope Francis has been uncharitable, rhetorically excessive, and in some cases even vulgar and childish. This is indefensible.
[Such criticisms I take care not to post here, because there is more than enough to argue about the demerits of AL without muddling them with other aspersions that do not address these demerits themselves.]
The pope, whatever his real or imagined faults, is still the pope. He is the Holy Father and the Vicar of Christ, and must always be treated with the reverence and charity that the dignity of his office entails.
[Yes, but it is legitimate and right to criticize him as Jorge Bergoglio misusing the office, which is the brunt of the criticism against him so far[bU].] All Catholics are bound earnestly to pray for him, to express their concerns in a respectful and non-polemical way, and
to give him the benefit of the doubt.
[This is the default position regarding the Pope and his office, not regarding the person occupying the office - and Joseph Ratzinger, for example, demonstrated clearly that a pope can distinguish his statements and actions as Pope from those that he undertakes as himself, the private individual. But Bergoglio does not, because he has said "Everything I say is magisterium!". Besides, how can one continue giving the benefit of hthe doubt to someone with his unbroken track record for deliberate equivocation if not outright lying whenever expedient in order to push his agenda?]
It is not the case, however, that Catholic teaching forbids all public criticism of a pope. The bishops who condemned Pope Honorius did so publicly, and the theologians who criticized Pope John XXII did so publicly. Aquinas holds that although in general the rebuke of a prelate ought to be carried out in private, there is an exception to be made precisely where matters of grave doctrinal error are concerned:
It must be observed, however, that if the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly. Hence Paul, who was Peter's subject, rebuked him in public, on account of the imminent danger of scandal concerning faith, and, as the gloss of Augustine says on Galatians 2:11, “Peter gave an example to superiors, that if at any time they should happen to stray from the straight path, they should not disdain to be reproved by their subjects.” (Summa Theologiae II-II.33.4)
[Of course, this is one Aquinas statement that neither Bergoglio nor his claque would ever ever bring up, as brazen as they were to quote him repeatedly out of context to support spurious assertions in AL!]
The current Code of Canon Law states at Canon 212:
The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.
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.
[But this is a canonical provision that the Bergoglians totally ignore, as if it does not exist at all. And of course, they would never cite it because it undercuts and rejects outright all their unrighteous indignation that anyone should even dare to say anything negative about Bergoglio.]
It seems that some Catholics who deny that the pope can ever be criticized publicly base this opinion on a misunderstanding of
Donum Veritatis [Not that there is any indication they are even aware of this document!], which, when discussing the legitimacy in some cases of criticizing Magisterial statements, says that
“the theologian should avoid turning to the ‘mass media’” or “exert the pressure of public opinion.” As theologians with a reputation for faithfulness to the Magisterium have argued, however, it is a mistake to read
Donum Veritatis as ruling out all public criticism. William May writes:
The Instruction obviously considers it proper for theologians to publish their “questions,” for it speaks of their obligation to take seriously into account objections leveled against their views by other theologians and to revise their positions in the light of such criticism - and this is normally given only after a theologian has made his questions known by publishing them in professional theological journals. (An Introduction to Moral Theology, Revised edition, pp. 241-42)
Similarly, Cardinal Avery Dulles writes:
Archbishop Quinn, in my opinion, is correct in pointing out that the “public dissent” repudiated by the instruction has to do with organized opposition and pressure tactics, and that the instruction does not discountenance expression of one’s views in a scholarly manner that might be publicly reported. (The Craft of Theology, New expanded edition, p. 115)
It is crucial to keep in mind the context in which
Donum Veritatis was issued.
Progressive theologians such as Hans Küng and Charles Curran had in the preceding decades been openly and vigorously challenging longstanding and settled doctrines concerning papal infallibility, sexual morality, and so forth.
Progressive theologians had a tendency to pit themselves as a kind of counter-magisterium of experts against what they portrayed as an authoritarian, blinkered, and anachronistic Roman bureaucracy that needed to be dragged into the modern world. They could count on liberal journalists to further this narrative and to help rally public opinion behind the progressives.
The hope was that the Church might be intimidated into changing its long-standing teachings, just as a government might be intimidated into changing its policies by a sufficiently sizable and angry populace.
This politicization of theology in the interests of overturning Church teaching is the kind of thing Donum Veritatis was reacting to in its remarks about mass media, public opinion, etc.
What is going on with the four cardinals, the forty-five theologians, Grisez and Finnis, et al. is very different. They are asking the pope to uphold traditional and settled teaching, not to overturn it, and their mode of discourse is scholarly, dispassionate, and respectful.
Quo vadis, Petre?
It is hard to see how a continued failure to respond to the four cardinals and the other critics could be justified. Ensuring doctrinal clarity and unity within the Church are two of the chief reasons why the papacy exists in the first place. And both doctrinal clarity and unity are now in danger.
There is no agreement on the meaning of Amoris.
- Some claim that it is a revolutionary breach with tradition, others that it is perfectly in continuity with tradition.
- Different bishops in different dioceses are implementing different interpretations of the document, some maintaining previous practice, some departing from it.
- Some Catholics regard Amoris’s defenders as dissenters from binding teaching, while others regard the critics of Amoris as dissenters.
- Some worry that Francis is, with Amoris, undermining the authority of the Church and the papacy.
- Others seem to think that upholding the authority of the papacy requires punishing the critics of Amoris.
Tempers are high, and many fear that
schism is imminent. [I still do not understand why knowledgeable commentators, as Feser obviously is, continue to bandy 'schism is imminent' so loosely, without stating in any way how a schism can happen - who will break away formally from the Roman Catholic Church, as the Orthodox and the Protestants did in their time: the at-best-heterodox pope and his myrmidons, or faithful Catholics who uphold and defend the deposit of faith?
- The pope won't, because as duly elected pope, he has all the advantages of papal authority to do as he pleases (or so he thinks). - And certainly, faithful Catholics won't, because the one, holy, Roman Catholic and apostolic church is our Church, and it is the Church of Christ, not the church of Bergoglio, whatever changes and distortions he may make to the deposit of Catholic faith, which by those very changes, is no longer Catholic.
- It is certainly possible that some ueber-militants could break away by whatever name they choose to call themselves as did the FSSPX in their time, insisting that they constitute the 'true Church', but they will be a minority.
NO! what we will have is an exacerbation of the already deep division in the Church between those who believe that, at the very least, this pope is leading the Church astray, away from the Church that Christ instituted, and those who accept his statements and actions unconditionally because at best, they mistakenly think that 'whatever the pope says must be right because he is the pope', or at worst, they claim the Holy Spirit is behind everything he says and does, and he therefore cannot possibly say and do anything wrong.
In such a situation of non-schism but abysmal internal division, all sides will claim to be Catholic.
There is only one man who can resolve the crisis, and that is Pope Francis. And resolving these sorts of crises is at the very top of the list defining the job description for any pope. When such a crisis has arisen precisely as a consequence (however unintended) of a pope’s actions, his obligation to resolve it is surely even graver.
There is also the consideration that,
just as Arianism was the main challenge to the Faith at the time of Liberius, and Monothelitism was the main challenge to the Faith at the time of Honorius, so too is the sexual revolution arguably the main challenge to the Faith today. [But the sexual revolution is only the emblem and stand-in of that deep-seated moral revolution which became official overnight in 1968 - which absolutized the supremacy of the 'I' in deciding what is right and wrong, as in "What is right is whatever I think is right, and no one can tell me otherwise", also known as 'primacy of conscience'.]
The modern, liberal, secular Western world regards the Catholic Church as an obstacle to progress in many respects, but
there is nothing for which the Church is hated more than her stubborn insistence on the indissolubility of marriage and the intrinsic immorality of contraception, abortion, fornication, homosexual acts, and the like.
Secularists and progressives have for decades dreamed of finding a way finally to break this intransigence and bring the Church to heel on these matters.
Their greatest weapon has been the rhetoric of mercy, forgiveness, and non-judgmentalism. That is to say, they have used (a distortion of) one part of Christian teaching as a bludgeon with which they might shatter another part. [But none of that rhetoric characterized the anti-Catholic campaigns of the past, which were focused on how the Church was wrong because her teaching has remained medieval, and therefore, obsolete and obscurantist, when she should teach according to the times! The rhetoric described by Feser only surfaced with Bergoglio who does use his rhetoric of false mercy to bludgeon faithful Catholics who see through it and reject it, and worse, whose most heterodox (near-heretical, if you wish] statements are patently anti-Catholic.]
Rightly or wrongly, they have seen in Pope Francis’s various controversial remarks on matters of sexual morality and marriage, and especially in Amoris, the sort of opening they have long hoped for.
[Oh, they see it as much more than an 'opening'. Now they have the certainty that one of their own became - to their great wonderment and unalloyed delight - the official leader of the Church, and has already wrought in less than four years what they have failed to do in decades (or centuries, if we go back to the so-called Englihtenment).]
St. Jerome famously remarked, of the time of Liberius, that “the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian.” Today it seems the world groans and marvels to find that we are all sexual revolutionaries now.
[I would re-state that, to say, more correctly: "The Catholic world groans and marvels to find that we are all supposed to be Bergoglians now".]
Except that Catholics are not and never can be
[sexual revolutionaries or Bergoglians], any more than they can be Arians. Pope Liberius was not an Arian, and Pope Francis is not a sexual revolutionary (as is obvious when one considers all the things he has said on the subject of sexual morality, many of which are very traditional).
He is, as he has said, “a son of the church” for whom “the teaching of the church is clear.” [He may have said that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is so. Because that's what he said because it was expedient to say in July 2013 when he was asked about what he thought of homosexuality. He answered, in effect, 'Look up what the Catechism says' - instead of simply saying the operative sentence from the Catechism - because "the teaching of the Church is clear, and I am a son of the Church". Since when he has gone on to subvert and diistort not just the teaching of the Church but some of the more significant teachings of Jesus himself as quoted in the Gospels, and in AL, to affirm anti-Catholic teachings, even if behind a smokescreen of casuistry and/or in footnotes. No, Mr. Feser, one does not give anyone the benefit of the doubt in such cases.]
Arianism once seemed invincible, the wave of the future. Now few people even remember what the fuss was about.
The sexual revolution too [One must insist it was not just a sexual revolution but a full-fledged across-the-board moral revolution will someday be looked back upon as
the temporary and freakish aberration [Not so sure about that - the secular world always advances in the direction of greater secularity, i.e., as a liberation from all outside influences like religion and the supremacy of individual 'freedom'. Seculars and the secular-minded will never shackle themselves,even if they would and do seek to shackle all who do not abide by their dicta.]]
Its challenge to the Church will fail, just as Roman persecution, Arianism and other heresies, the Muslim conquests, the Protestant revolt, the French Revolution, communism, etc. have all failed to destroy the Church. The pope could not prevent that happy outcome even if he wanted to.
But he can decide what role he will play in securing it, just as it was up to Liberius to decide what role he would play in the resolution of the Arian crisis.
It would seem that history has now very clearly set out for the pope exactly what his options are, in the guise of the four cardinals’ dubia. He can either a) answer them in a way that overturns traditional teaching, b) answer them in a way that reaffirms traditional teaching, or c) continue, until the end of his pontificate, to refrain from answering them.
The pope is surely not going to opt for (a). For example, he is not flatly going to declare that adulterous sexual acts are now sometimes morally permissible. Even if he wanted to teach such a thing – and I do not believe that he does – it would be suicidal for him to do so.
What has, to this point in Church history, been merely an abstract theoretical scenario debated by theologians would suddenly become a terrifying reality, and the Church would be thrown into perhaps the greatest crisis in her history.
If the pope opts for (b)
[which means admitting he erred in the dubious doctrinal affirmations he makes or implies in AL - and does anyone really think he would do that? We must all pray he will, however, because that would be the first genuine act of humility coming from him], the current, more moderate crisis will end.
The progressives will of course be extremely disappointed. There will be recriminations, whining, and foot-stomping. But that will peter out, because their position requires ambiguity, and if the pope explicitly reaffirms that adulterous sexual acts are always and absolutely impermissible, that ambiguity will have been taken from them.
Moreover, the progressives have, after all, claimed not to be reversing past teaching, so they can hardly complain if the pope reaffirms it. They will simply have to put up and shut up.
It would seem, however, that to opt for (b) might essentially make of Amoris (or at least of chapter 8, its best known and most controversial section) a dead letter. For if, despite all the talk about “discerning, accompanying, and integrating,” couples living in adulterous relationships are told unambiguously that they still must refrain from all sexual activity on pain of mortal sin (and thus on pain of unworthiness to receive communion), then it will be undeniable that Amoris doesn’t change anything. What had seemed a revolutionary development and Pope Francis’s signature achievement will turn out to have been much ado about nothing.
That might make option (c) tempting. But it is a temptation that must be resisted. Taking option (c) will only cause the current crisis to deepen and fester. And, in light of the larger cultural context within which that crisis is occurring, it might reinforce the false impression that the Church can and will accommodate herself to the sexual revolution. As Pope Felix III declared, in words quoted by Pope Leo XIII:
“An error which is not resisted is approved; a truth which is not defended is suppressed.” [It is one maxim that applies to all the dubious ambiguities of this pope so far.]
To quote a progressive theologian, Harvey Cox:
“Not to decide is to decide.”
Though, the longer a decision is delayed [unless he has already decided, as he appears to have done, by not deciding at all! - "Let it be! Haga lio! - that's the way I want it"] perhaps the question of what Pope Francis will do will become less important. As Honorius could tell you, sometimes it is what the next pope does that matters most.
Perhaps a qualified theologian should write more about 'non-irreformable reforms' - i.e., reformable or reversible - in the light of the smug stateent by Bergoglio eminence grise Mons. Fernandez that "this pope intends his reforms to be irreversible". A supremely hubristic and fallacious assertion that no one has contested, despite the fact that the only things irreversible - because immutable - in the Church are what we are taught by Scriptures (Revelation) and the Tradition and Magisterium based solidly on that Revelation. Anything else is reformable and reversible.