Posted on 05/26/2017 9:18:05 AM PDT by ebb tide
Too many Catholics are caught up in a “comfortable” Catholicism that makes them unwilling, and even unable, to see the “grave problems” currently besetting the Church, said a renowned theologian and one of the world’s top Catholic experts on the Church Fathers.
“Most Catholics seem to live their life on a sort of comfortable zone, just the way that a lot of bishops live in a sort of safety-first sort of zone,” Australian patristics and classics scholar Anna Silvas said. “It is too disturbing” for those living in such a zone to “pry any more deeply,” because what they might find will challenge them too much, she added.
Silvas was specifically referring to problems arising from Pope Francis’ controversial Amoris Laetitia. The Apostolic Exhortation’s novel concept of “mercy” has been used by some Cardinals and bishops to justify giving Holy Communion to civilly-divorced-and-remarried Catholics living in adultery and even to people living in a homosexual relationship. Catholic critics say that such a move amounts to giving tacit approval to adultery and homosexuality, actions that have always been condemned by the Church as gravely immoral sexual sins.
Silvas, a senior research fellow at Australia's University of New England, said that too many in the Church are governed by what she called an “affective papalism,” in which everything a pope says is “an oracle from heaven.”
People are too scared to ask what happens when a pope is “disobedient” to the teachings of a previous pope, she said. That kind of question “doesn’t compute” for most people, she added.
Silvas said that faithful Catholics who notice discrepancies between what a pope says the Church teaches and what the Church actually teaches are called “unfaithful,” when nothing could be further from the truth.
She said that the laity, priest, bishops, cardinals, and the pope are all “obliged” to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to the teachings of the Catholic Church which he founded.
“The Church is a covenant of common obedience...and all are obliged to that obedience to Jesus Christ, right up to the top. The pope needs to be obedient, indeed, preeminently so,” she said.
Silvas said that Pope Benedict was likely right when he spoke of a faithful Church, one that is obedient to Christ, being a smaller Church.
A faithful Church will shrink in numbers, she said, but it will acquire a different character than what is currently in vogue.
“[Only] a really intense commitment to Christ will jolt us out of [the current crisis],” she said. “There are no easy answers except for a very serious interior turning to Our Lord who is the one true Lord, Master, and Bridegroom of his Church, yesterday, today, and forever,” she added.
Professor Silvas joins the ranks of Princeton Professor Robert P. George and Catholic writer Msgr. Charles Pope in calling Catholics to rise from a “comfortable Catholicism” and live the truth of the Gospel without compromise.
“The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over, the days of comfortable Catholicism are past,” said Prof. George in a 2014 speech. “It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian, a good Catholic, an authentic witness to the truths of the Gospel. A price is demanded and must be paid,” he said.
Msgr. Charles Pope wrote in a 2016 article that Catholics must put away “comfort” and live their faith as if they were at war.
“It seems there is no awareness that we are at war and that Catholics need to be summoned to sobriety, increasing separation from the wider culture, courageous witness and increasing martyrdom,” he said.
The biggest threat facing the church is the current fake-assed Red Pope.
I will also accept “Pope Che” as the correct answer.
“Comfortable Catholic” Ping
Genesis 6:6&7 reads as follows: “It repented Him (God) that He
had made man on the Earth. And being touched inwardly with sorrow of heart, He said: I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the Earth, from man even to beasts, from the creeping things even to the fowls of the air, for it repents Me that I have made them.” Under God’s direction and supervision Noe spent the next 100 years building his family and the ark and then waiting for any of his neighbors who would come. No one showed up, and God therefore instructed him to pull out all the little rooms that He told him in verse 14 to build into the ark and was directed by God to bring 2 of every animal male and female to replace those humans that never showed. How ironic. The Bible tells us that humans were created to take the place of the fallen angels in Heaven and now are replaced by the animals on the ark!
Other noteworthy 100 year time periods: The French Kings were given 100 years by Jesus to consecrate their country to His Sacred Heart. Upon their failure to do so, 100 years later the French Revolution replaced the monarchy with a Republic and among those who were beheaded was the king himself. (Certainly we have to understand that the royalty that was beheaded represented the Catholic Church royalty.); Satan, over heard by Pope St. Leo XIII was given 100 years to take over the Catholic Church in 1884. For the outcome, all we need do is look at the condition of the Church in it’s different divisions as it stands today and whose running it. A true Alphonse and Gaston routine with two popes at once and all the ruckus that that continues to cause; Our Lady appeared at Fatima in 1917 to almost beg mankind to straighten up their act in light of all the devastation that Satan caused during his 100 years and since. Our Lord intervened in 1936 and connected the fate of the popes to that of the French Kings since they too failed in consecrating Russia to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. It is now the year 2017, 100 years later. It seems rather apparent to this writer that the phenomenon of the recent blood moon tetrad was one of the Biblically prophesied events in the sun and the moon and the stars when the sun was turned to darkness and the moon to blood, “before the great and manifest day of the Lord come” found in Acts 2:20.
The Protestants went crazy with their guesses and predictions especially those concerning Isreal when Our Lady’s warnings at Fatima were for the entire world and in fact thanks to World’s News Networks, the blood moons and the solar eclipse were seen not just by Isreal but by the entire world. When are the Catholics and then the world going to wake up to the absolute implications of Our Lady’s Warnings at Fatima and straighten up before the destruction comes of the great and manifest day of the Lord. For more detail on what has happened and what needs to happen, go to “The Witnesses Are Here!”
https://sites.google.com/view/thewitnessesarehere
for five Treatises on this topic, and follow the links to the other websites.
Every heretic has his fool followers. Look at Luther; and he's been dead for over 500 years.
It’s not a denomination, and the pope is not its head.
Well, people can *intuit* all they want but there's nothing in the passage to suggest that. There's no reason to think that the rooms weren't for animals and there's nothing that indicates Noah ripped out rooms and remodeled the ark to accommodate animals.
That's taking a lot of liberty with the passage.
Paragraphs are your friends.
I would suggest you check out this link for formatting HTML.
HTML Sandbox 2015
That’s way too difficult to read.Proper formatting would help.
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The Catholic Caucus addendum has been removed so Lutherans and other non Catholics can give answers to your comment #7
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3555516/posts?page=7#7
If you are going to post a thread with a caucus designation, please study the caucus guidelines by clicking on my name at the bottom of this post.
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