Posted on 02/14/2017 3:01:34 AM PST by BlessedBeGod
All sorts of rumors are now swirling about current events in the Church:
Motus in fine velocior
Motion accelerates when the end is near
In the light of the fact that Pope Francis has openly endorsed heretical understandings of Amoris laetitia in his letter to the bishops of the Buenos Aires region of Sept. 5th 2016, it is more likely than not that he is in fact a formal heretic.Why then have so few cardinals and bishops publicly lined up with the four "dubia cardinals" on this? Lamont argues that much of the reason stems from an absolutist understanding of "obedience," with roots in the philosophy of St. Ignatius Loyola and other 16th and 17th century Jesuits. But this understanding is erroneous and dangerous:
The question of how anyone, even a cardinal, can correct the Pope is an important one. It is a basic principle of the divinely established constitution of the Church that the Pope judges all other Catholics on earth and is judged by none of them. But this constitution does not establish the Pope as an autocrat with tyrannical authority, who is answerable to no-one. The Pope's authority is a legal one, and as with all legal authority it involves duties to his subjects as well as rights over them. The duty to confess the Catholic faith is a fundamental duty of the papal office. His subjects may thus formally request and even require him to carry out this duty. The right to make such a formal request belongs to any Catholic, but the cardinals, whose office is to advise the Pope, have a strict duty as well as a right to make this request. The cardinals who have failed to do this are guilty of a grave dereliction of duty. This failure is a catastrophe that threatens to lead to the disintegration of most of the Church.Read the full article here.
“IT WOULD have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom that would indeed have been simple. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”
~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chap VI.
The above passage by G.K. Chesterton is substantial and deeply relevant. Its application not only to Francis but also to political establishments in the West cannot be overstated. The false claim of xenophobia against traditionalists denies the substantial importance of historical precedent and gathered wisdom.
Whether questioning the inerrancy of scripture or the foundational truths of our Constitution, denying one’s roots is always an act of madness. This noble Pope is mad, as are his ideological fellow travelers in culture and politics. What else is it to define madness but to be nothing else but mad?
The author missed the actual option when considering “to what end”. The end of the Church Age is near. The Revelation 12:1-2 Sign in the Heavens is complete this September.
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