Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Laity role with an elected Pope who contradicts Church Teaching

A few noteworthy things over the past few days.

A story materialized a few days back, wherein a mother claimed she told the Pope her son didn't go to Mass, and he reportedly told her not to worry about the Ten Commandments so long as her son is a "good kid".

A few months back, I would have thought this to be an exaggeration, but this is consistent with his shtick: When Christ's heirs are committing adultery, skipping Mass, lying, bearing false witness, using contraception, killing, the role of Christ's priests is to find the good in it.

How many times have we brought our families before a priest so they could substantiate, affirm, confirm and enlighten about the beauty and necessity to judge our own conduct in accordance with Church teaching, only to have the man undermine and rob them of it?

My prayers are with that poor woman. Can you imagine the impact of watching the Pope rob your family of it all, knowing this moment could affect generations?

Don't get me wrong, the adverse effects of depriving a generation of catechesis and turning the Sacred Liturgy into Sunday morning religious entertainment they think people are going to get up our of bed for is a conundrum. You can't drag your children to Mass, but when we very much need the support of a priest to enlighten , encourage and support us in our quest to give them the tools for salvation, what is the purpose of saying something that unravels them from the Deposit of Faith and the Sacraments, perhaps for the rest of their life ?

Why not compliment him, help the mother find a place where he can contribute his gifts and feel connected to his spiritual home?

When a mother approaches a priest with her family to seek his help, the hour has come for him to reign in the soul. There is never a time to convey the Commandments are legal mumbo jumbo impertinent to salvation.

Never.

In another development, the Pope contradicted the Deposit of Faith on the death penalty, suggesting the Charlie Mansons of this world should be set free as life imprisonment is a death sentence to mass murderers.

Yet another example he considers himself to be the crusader who leads Christ's people away from the slavery of the Catechism.

Russ Douthat wrote a brutally honest assessment of the problem we have with this Pope: he is contradicting Church teaching. Catholics who pursue their lives trying to live in a state of Grace - and that is not a small group - are about as likely to introduce his ideas to our children as we would introduce Joan Chittister as a role model for feminine fashion.

Russ stated, and I agree, that when the Church is burdened with a Pope who contradicts Church teaching, the role of the Church is to resist his errors.

But if he seems to be choosing the more dangerous path — if he moves to reassign potential critics in the hierarchy, if he seems to be stacking the next synod’s ranks with supporters of a sweeping change — then conservative Catholics will need a cleareyed understanding of the situation.

They can certainly persist in the belief that God protects the church from self-contradiction. But they might want to consider the possibility that they have a role to play, and that this pope may be preserved from error only if the church itself resists him.

A few stories at Fr. Z's are worth commentary.

First, Fr. Z is a bit ruffled by the timing of SSPX threatened excommunications.



I don't have the empathy Fr. Z does for SSPX and my own diligence found documents from the CDF stating SSPX Masses doesn't fulfill Sunday obligation. There is no place in the world where SSPX is permitted to administer Sacraments.

However, it is duly noted that a week after we are told Pope Francis wants the Church to be a welcoming place for apostates who spent decades teaching defiance to Church teaching (and millions have died in that state), actions are taken to excommunicate victims who fled from the danger and scandal.

Finally, there is this jewel about the story at Buzzfeed stating Cardinal Burke did not say the Pope is harming the Church.

Cardinal Burke corrected the record to relate the literal message was:

Here is what Cardinal Burke actually said:

“I can’t speak for the pope and I can’t say what his position is on this, but the lack of clarity about the matter has certainly done a lot of harm.”

What BuzzFeed reported:

“According to my understanding of the church’s teaching and discipline, no, it wouldn’t be correct,” Burke said, saying the pope had “done a lot of harm” by not stating “openly what his position is.”


Are you kidding me?

If the Pope has been in office for a year and a half and his pontifications have left Christ's people confused, and that lack of clarity is doing harm - who do you think is the party responsible for his lack of clarity and the harm it is causing?

The Pope.

Who is the responsible party to mitigate the harm being done?

The Pope.

I don't see any correction on Cardinal Burkes reported words that the Pope giving us clarity was long overdue.

While I get why the calibration of Cardinal Burke's point was upsetting to the Pope, what it is exactly everyone is pretending was supposed to be the conclusion?






25 comments:

Anonymous said...

We''re on the precipice with this papacy....the frightening reality is that this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Praying fervently that Bishop Francis will wake up and realize the papacy is not his personal plaything......meanwhile the too numerous to mention uncatechised are being weighed down by the stones being handed them by HH.

JB said...


Now HH just came out and stated that God "is not a divine being" and did not "wave a magic wand" when he created man. Says God is not a "magician" in the context of evolution.

Leaves me speechless. I guess Jesus was not a magician either, and His raising Lazarus from the dead was really the operation of evolution somehow, pre-planned by God the Father and not really a miracle of Christ.

I can barely listen to him at this point.

JB said...


Ok now apparently he was mistranslated again, the word he used was "demiurge," not divine being. Still it is confused. Catholic doctrine is irreconcilable with polygenistic evolution, any notion that man's soul evolved from matter, or any school of thought that rules out God intervening in the world to create the first two human beings by, in fact, waving His hand over matter.

Pius XII said it best.

"For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]

Anonymous said...

I wonder if this is the time to point out that the Head of the Jesuits is the only one who might just be able to point out any Errors of Pope Francis

Anonymous said...

I can't believe he's really saying what he's saying! I do believe that God is not a magician, magicians use witchcraft, God is ALL Powerful, All knowing, Divine. Big Bang my eye! Or did we all really evolve from monkeys?

JB said...


Yes this is very troubling. God can do whatever He wants. A miracle is not the act of a "magician." Jesus performed miracles which defied all laws of nature. Does Francis think this was "magic," or is the message that the miracles are really just "parables."

This is naturalism and rationalism of the modernists pure and simple. No miracles. No divine intervention. God is a remote "force" of sorts. Capable of "surprises" apparently, but not suspending natural laws at His will.

Not Catholicism, sorry.

TTC said...

I wonder how he reconciles his non-belief of miracles with Transubstantiation?

Anonymous said...

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141027_plenaria-accademia-scienze.html

Be careful with internet auto-translation services.....

Steve Dalton said...

When this Pope started this nonsense a year and a half ago, everybody thought he was just careless with off the cuff remarks. I now believe this man was slyly telegraphing his intentions ahead of time to alert his supporters and to confuse the rest of us.

Anonymous said...

Yes, Anonymous, we did evolve from the great apes.

Catechist Kev said...

"Yes, Anonymous, we did evolve from the great apes."

Then why are there still "great apes"? ;^)

I suppose they still may be... evolving?

TTC said...

LOL.

Every time an ape has a baby ape, these fks are waiting for a human person to come out.

I am with JB. The idea that a Pope would think Christ has no power to instantly do something of unlimited magnitude because he is not a sorcerer is exasperating .

JB said...



I have the gravest reservations about his beliefs. I hate to say it but I do. Jesus defied natural laws whenever he wished to; that is the nature of a miracle. It is super-natural. To suggest that God does not do supernatural things is not just alarming, it's silly, and faithless from a Catholic view. God became a man, there's your first clue that he suspends the laws of nature (on earth) whenever He wishes.

Jack O'Malley said...

Carol: I wonder how he reconciles his non-belief of miracles with Transubstantiation?

This might get complicated. Not least because Jorge Bergoglio is a Jebby. So, in a nutshell, here goes.

The Orthodox have valid consecrations. But they don't use the term "transubstantiation". They did attempt to translate it as a calque into Greek at one of their post-schismatic synods (I'll guess Jassy but I'd have to look it up again). But they use the term "change". The Orthodox forbear from defining the metaphysical with physical terminology. And with good reason. They are Greeks and know their philosophical tradition.

In the West, we use that term based upon Aristotelian metaphysics. Well, not entirely, but rather based upon the Angelic Doctor's coopting of the term. But if you don't accept that metaphysic, then what gives? I think there might be quarks. I don't think Ari of Stagira or Tom of Aquino thought about quarks. James Joyce did though. Ok, Ok, I've gone beyond the beyonds now.

When I studied at the local Jebby college, I met a variety of cassocked atheists and agnostics and protestants and Orthodox who nevertheless coesxisted in the order of St. Ignatius. They held a plethora of views of every theologic and Christologic heterodoxy, so much so that it was inconceivable that they could have been all in communion with the See of Peter. This was the sewage that fertilized the furrows for the likes of the faithless Mary Daly and her ilk. I will leave to the imagination of the reader the sexuality of those jesuits.

But to return to our sheep, Michael Voris, the internet instantiation of a "cretin", says that in the consuming of the host that you are eating the DNA of Christ. Good grief! Yet another imbecility from that "consecrated celibate". Mike needs to meet a nice girl. Thought at his age one might say a nice woman. Or widow. Or spinster. The guy is severely traumatised by the deaths of his brother and his mother. I entirely sympathise on that account. He did revert to Catholicism because of those deaths. He is right more than he is wrong, IMO, though his reticence to criticise the "bishop of Rome" is incongruous.

But when he is wrong he goes way off the rails. Examples abound. Fr. O'Google will raise them from the internet dead. A miracle of techology.

TTC said...

Jack, I have observed the Pooe in Eucharistic Adorarikn and it sure seemed to me he was a believer and deeply in love, as we are. That's what makes his cheapening of Divinity so baffling. He is in the world and thinks like a man who is ignorant of the heavenly.

I didn't know about the impact and influence of the deaths of Michael's mother and brother. His work in the vineyard of Our Lord must bring them much joy.

Sometimes I look around on a Sunday and wonder how many in the pews realize what isabiut to happen, are aware of the mystical world and have even an inkling about the Properties of Christ in the Eucharist and how to benefit from Them. I am not optimistic. Day Mass has a much higher percentage of people who get what it's all about.

Sometimes I wonder how I made it through the gauntlet of my sin and unworthiness. I feel so lucky and blessed. I owe a great debt to the nuns, priests, relatives and friends who dragged me to the mountaintop.

TTC said...

ps, I can't fathom the burden of being the bishop of Rome. So few have the courage to save you from yourself and drag you kicking and screaming to where you do not want to go.

TTC said...

By the way, how would you feel if Elton John announced your theology was in tune with the underworld and called you a hero?

Our children and our children's children are screwed.

Michael said...

Bergoglio: “All Christians and people of good will are thus called today to struggle not only for abolition of the death penalty, whether it be legal or illegal and in all its forms, but also to improve prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their liberty. And this, I connect with life imprisonment,” he said at an October 23 event with the International Association of Penal Law. “LIFE IMPRISONMENT IS A HIDDEN DEATH PENALTY.”

BERGOGLIO CREEPS ME OUT!He is a secularist.

Anonymous said...

Question: what does resisting mean in practical terms?
- correct the NO priest after his heretic homily?
- speak out to our fellow church goers about what's going on?
- confront those who defend Bergoglio?
- move out from the NO church and let everyone be seduced and manipulated by the NO priest?

TTC said...

Yes. Depending upon your situation. If you have children, your first job is to find a priest willing to teach them what they need to know to make sound judgments for the rest of their lives. If your children are grown and you feel like you can keep watch and do all the other things, yes.

And more.

Start a blog and report what is going on in your area. Report homilies. Report programs. Report speakers. Go and report what was said and who said it. Send to the bishops. If he does nothing, report that on the blog and send to nuncio. If nothing is done after reporting to nuncio, report that on the blog and then send to CDF.

It is expected that Pope Francis will castrate the CDF. Send the paper trail to him anyway.

Rally people to communicate their concerns all the way through the process. Try to approach the wealthy people and encourage them to communicate they will stop giving money.

Money is their oxygen. Cut off the supply in every way you can.

There are several bishops whose agendas are so corrupt they don't care about the money, but most do. Whoever has the most money and political power controls catechesis.

Realistically, those who dissent don't give that much but they make a lot of noise about stopping their contributions if the teachings of the Church are taught to us. Th

Meanwhile wealthy faithful families have continued to financially support the demoralization if their children. Unfortunately, when it comes to catechesis, we will get what we pay for in a corrupt system.

Jack O'Malley said...

Carol,

I think Elton John's suggestion that this pope should be canonized NOW is very dangerous especially in this papacy.

I am very apprehensive that Pope Humble will take it into his head to stage his own canonization in St. Jorge's Square on All Saints' Day! Tomorrow! He's probably been trick-or-treating around the suburbicarian parishes of Rome dressed as himself. With a rainbow mozzetta, no doubt.

And yes, I meant St. Jorge's Square. The name change will be needed to reflect the glory of the first canonical living saint since the Incarnation. O the times! O the morals! as our Cicero once bemoaned in a far less crucial era.

And, may I add, that I am glad to see your rebellious Irish chutzpah (that's not a Gaelic word but it should be) counseling cutting off their revenue.

I'll repeat my old line: Don't trust them with your money. Don't trust them with your children. Don't trust them with your soul.

BTW, a post from Rorate Caeli has Bernard Fellay's entirely correct response to Bishop Somaro's attempt allegedly to excommunicate anyone who dares to receive the sacraments from an SSPX (FSSPX) priest.

Fr. Hunwicke in the last couple of days asked how that could canonically happen. Ed Peters has maintained a discrete silence. Mmm. Cum tacet, clamat. (When he is silent, he shouts it.) (Another nod to Tully).

My usual disclaimer: I have never attended an FSSPX mass and have only ever attended TLM's here in Paddy O'Malley's bailiwick at either Holy Trinity or Mary Immaculate of Lourdes.

Keep fighting the good fight, Carol. You've the true and just rebellious Irish spirit.

Anonymous said...

Thank you TTC. I tried "reporting" in a silent way in my community (priests with women, psychological abuse, persecutions, etc) but most people choose not to believe me, they think too highly of priests or they defend them because they had some kind of reward from him (a possition in the Church, income, etc).

I ended up reporting the nunciate but had no response.

Las think I know the priest in my parrish asked confirmation students to light two red candles and cover a Jesus picture with mud (to see how their sins stain Jesus)....really dark stuff is happening and nobody wants to see or admit it.

Thank you for your advice, I will not stop resisting them.
God bless you

TTC said...

Anon, you need to understand what corruption is all about.

Of course the leadership in the Catholic Church respects priests who mislead with apostasy. Those men are popular with the public. The public praises them, ninates them for awards, puts their face all over the cover of a magazine.

This is the show that brings them the money.

Get it?

They will go so far as to respect and defend these priests even when they are physically raping the children.

Paul Shanley was one if the most respected priests in the history of Boston.

He was loved and respected by our homosexual brothers and sisters because he was forever enciuring them that the teachings of the Church on homosexuality are their enemy. He affirmed them by hopping into the sack with them and their young adult children. He was a hero praised by the Boston Globe. The politicians loved him.

This is why the Chancery protects these men. They bring praise and money.

They sacrifice the salvation of the souls they were ordained to save to receive it.

This is the system.

We now have it being institutes in the Holy See.

The corrupt are in power.

That is the show at the Synod you just witnessed.

You can tell which side a Bishop is on in five minutes.

As soon as any defense is issued, you know what you have on your hands and you go to the next level.

Don't look to any of them for affirmation. That has to come from Christ Himself who so desperately needs an army willing to forbear anything in it for themselves, especially respect from the bishops who are sponsoring this nightmare of a show.

You are looking at the reason Christ sweat His Precious Blood in the Garden of Gethsemene.

It is quite a disgusting show, isn't it.

They will hate and slander you. If it bothers you, offer it up as penance.

I couldn't muster a morsel of a concern or care out of it even if I tried! All I care about is serving Christ and as soon as I smell the stink of the corruption of souls, I put my engine on full throttle and place everything we in God's hands.

Look to Him for your consolation. Believe me when I tell you, you will get it.

TTC said...

Jack,

Thanks for your supportive words.

I think I have mentioned before that my own doge ncr on SSPX contradicts the positions Rorate takes about fulfilling a Sunday obligation. These men are simulating the Sacrament of Confession, defying obedience to their suspensions. They have no authority anywhere in the world to say public Mass.

To me, they are more stomach turning than the apostates.

They needed to come back to Christ's Church and fight like a man. If they hadn't left, we may not be in the position we are in.

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