Is Cardinal Kasper Suggesting the Pope Intends to Dissolve the Vatican?

I don't see the wisdom in letting all the nuts come out of the woodwork to say stupid things that damage the relationship between faithful Catholics and the Chair of Peter for months or years, do you?

Earlier this week, Kasper contradicted Pope Benedict XVI's statement that damage done to the Church after Vatican II was a miscarriage of intentions and teachings of the Church - and to the world - at the hands of unfaithful prelates and lay people. He  caricatured the trajectory of the Pope Francis as re-energizing the dream of extinguishing Church teaching and sanctification to an institution that operates pot luck suppers and soup kitchens.

This is what he said:

Brace yourself.

Quoting a seminal 2005 speech by Pope Benedict -- who often clashed with Kasper -- Kasper says that the council must not be interpreted as a "break" with tradition but as a "reform" and "renewal" in continuity with the church's past.

According to Kasper, this could now lead, under Pope Francis, to translating the council's statements into "practical consequences" that could rekindle its "innovative impulse."

And, here he is shooting off his mouth again today

Edit: now that there’s been a change of management. Cardinal Kasper feels free reign to speak his mind.  

“The world Church can’t be led in a Eurocentric way any more.” This is what the German Curial Cardinal Walter Kasper said in an interview with “Corriere della Sera”, that was published this Sunday. In a “globalized and complex world collegiality is the right direction”, said the former leader of Vatican Ecumenism. It is also important for the Pope, that he governs and has the last word. “But it is important that he has well informed advisors about him, who represent the entire world.” The Curia needs reform, “in order to become more efficient”. That Pope Francis has chosen eight Cardinals to advice means “no synodal form of government as it is understood by the Orthodox”, specified Cardinal Kasper

This is the witness the Pope is giving to the children of Catholic parents who have had the ugly chore of trying to explain why Father Queer Theology, Sister Sex Condoms and Contraception and the Woodstock Wingnuts are impediments to their salvation? He is going to give the witness that their parents were mistaken and the apostates had it right all along and he is here now to put them all back in power? I could, of course, be mistaken, but I don't think Cardinal Kasper has a handle on what the Pope is actually saying. The same old malady, BTW, that has crippled his intellect throughout his entire life. Though I'm not quite sure Fr. Landry has it nailed either (I'll get to that in a minute), he certainly is within the bullseye HERE.

A Church that merely protects its small flock, that gives all or most of its attention to its faithful clientele, he believes, “is a Church that is sick.” In a 2011 interview with an Argentinian Catholic news agency, he said this contagious spiritual sickness comes from a clericalism that passes from clergy to laypeople. “We priests tend to clericalize the laity. We do not realize it, but it is as if we infect them with our own disease. And the laity — not all, but many — ask us on their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar server than the protagonist of a lay path. We cannot fall into that trap — it is a sinful complicity.”  

Clericalism ails the clergy when they become too self-referential rather than missionary. But it afflicts laypeople worse, when they begin to believe that the fundamental service God is asking of them is to become greeters, lectors or extraordinary ministers of holy Communion at Church rather than to live and spread the faith in their families, workplaces, schools neighborhoods and beyond. 

The reform that’s needed, he continued in that interview, is “neither to clericalize nor ask to be clericalized. The layperson is a layperson and has to live as a layperson with the power of baptism, which enables him to be a leaven of the love of God in society itself, to create and sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from a pulpit but from his everyday life. And like all of us, the layperson is called to carry his daily cross — the cross of the layperson, not of the priest.”


Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pope-francis-and-the-reform-of-the-laity#ixzz2QSFwyEeE

It seems to me, the Pope is saying the abandonment of converting those outside of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and the clericalization is sinful complicity in the madness of the uncatechized and daffy women who stampeded and trampled our religion and robbed our children of the tools necessary for salvation.

Fr. Landry goes a bit off of the reservation here:

One of the wild grapes that flows from the vine of clericalism, the future Pope said in El Jesuita, is a hypercritical spirit that leads some Catholic priests and faithful to expend most of their energy censuring others inside and outside the Church rather than seeking to live and share the joy of the Christian faith.

“This is a problem not only for priests,” he said, “but also for laypeople. One isn’t a good Catholic when he is looking only for the negative, for what separates us. This isn’t what Jesus wants.” 

Such unredeemed behavior — found regularly in personal conversations, blogs, comment boxes and Internet video analyses — “mutilates the message” of the Christian faith and scares people away from it, he said.

Well, there are certainly legitimate concerns, but I most often find people who say things like this applying it to the wrong people.

For instance when Mark Shea criticizes Voris or Fr. West - etc., - whose apostolates are 99.9% filled with a very positive presentation of the Catholic religion.   Have you ever searched through that man's archives?   It is incredible.  I don't know how he does it.

But rather than acknowledging the large deposit of positive, critics focus on the tiny portion of Voris' apostolate that focuses on righteous delivery of criticism of prelates who are victimizing souls with their nonsense.

Similarly, if a Catholic is out in the world leading prayer groups, devotions, prayer, adoration, being a witness to faithful practice of our religion - through a priest like Fr. Landry has no knowledge of this quiet practice - if the same person mentions corruption and cronyism and dereliction of duty, he discharges a righteous request to cease from doing harm -- even if it is to a single soul -- as the ranting of a malcontent doing disservice to Christ's Church.

This is the very clericalism that needs reformation.

When a Catholic sees harm being done to a soul or worse, an entire parish or diocese of souls - bringing the error forward and seeking a process where the prelates in charge correct that error has yet to manifest itself.

I love Fr. Landry, but some of his generalizations in this piece are off of the reservation.

The reform of the laity, the document says, must involve re-forming them to become “missionary disciples in communion.”

Those four words define the lay vocation: converted followers of Jesus, who together with others who share Jesus’ life, faithfully seek to spread their joy, life and love to those who have not yet come into that two-fold communion.

It’s a community of believers trained and inspired to go out to transform politics, society, education, neighborhoods, family and marriages.

Anyone see the flaw in Fr. Landry's thesis?

When a priest brings in a speaker like Fr. Piggford who promotes homoeroticism to children, when a Cardinal endorses the apostolates of the Fr. Unnis, Fr. Garritys, Fr. Butterballinos, Fr. Josomas  - etc., and the forum for asking the Cardinal to correct these priests or remove them if they refuse to be corrected is rebuke, bully, threats and slander on the Cardinals blog of righteous Catholic parents whose loved ones are being influenced by the disordered witness of spiritually sick prelates

When righteous people follow protocol and contact the Papal Nuncio in their country, who is too busy or disinterested in the situation because he is out at swanky booze parties rubbing elbows with Michael Sean Winters and politicians who legislate the culture of death

When Catholics continue to follow protocol to the Holy See for decades which is responded to by the further empowering of disordered prelates in your diocese and it gets to the point where the Pope's butler has to sneak the documents out of the sick and disordered village and give up his freedom to fall on his sword for the sake of the Church - because the people who bring corruption to the surface are the people who are punished all the way to the top

Then the 'missionaries' are transforming politics by advancing the culture of death on every level. 

Telling righteous people they need to stop whistleblowing about the disorder and corruption is

a. not going to happen
b. reinforcing the good old boy network that protects disordered prelates by applying pressure to whistleblowers and therefor the wrong fix
c. skullduggery

A few weeks back, I was involved in small conversation about the state of the world when a young man suggested the fiat of Catholics as personal devotion and not one of conversion.   My friend, a wise man, put it succinctly:  When somebody sins, there is a person who is responsible for it - held accountable for it by Christ.  Either it is the person sinning, the priest who neglected his duty, the bishop leading the see who neglected his duty.  

There are, of course, some cases where Divine Mercy applies.  The person is low IQ or mentally ill, or in a remote desert of a third world country, etc.   But the adjudication of who is responsible for the world which has clearly gone mad from diabolical disorientation is on the shoulders of a responsible party and the road to hell is paved with their skulls.  Righteous people do everything they can to every party whom they see is derelict in duty to release their victims from ignorance and sin.

This is love that ends up hanging from the Crucifix. 

We're here to remind Fr. Landry and everyone else, all the way up the ladder to the Pope, that it is delusional to entertain the notion that Catholic parents and grandparents are going to silently watch the Pope usher back in apostates and ask us to sit in silence as they rob our loved ones of their salvation.

That era has passed.