Pope Francis met Secretly with Kim Davis, Offered his Support and Prayers

Well, for once, he did something really positive. He also made a statement yesterday about marriage being between a man and a woman.

Of course, there was a time when we didn’t have to wonder what a Pope thought about this...but I think one of Francis’ problems is that he is so eager to be liked by the world that while he may be perfectly orthodox, he soft pedals it in his public statements.

I had no idea he did so. Vatican officials have confirmed the visit happened.

The Vatican officials will neither confirm or deny the meeting. But one thing I'm suspicious of is the claim the Pope spoke in English the whole time because His Holiness isn't very proficient in that language.

Would that also end the COUNTER reformation??

Here's my prediction: Kim Davis will become a Catholic before all is said and done.

Here's my prediction: Pope Francis will become a holiness Pentecostal before all is said and done.

It was in the leadin teaser at the beginning of the TODAY© Show just a few minutes ago.

An excellent example of ecumenism in action!

Ignore theology and share the love.

"Doesn’t every Pope do this?"

Of course the do. And every other Pope cared for and helped the poor and unfortunate just as much as this one. The other Popes just didn't feel the need to call the news cameras every time they did it.

Davis’ parents are Roman Catholic. The Rosary is being given to them.

Francis hides his light under a bushel, craps on the American flag in public.

Joan and Wallace and Savanarola were political executions using religion as a mask. Remember that the Popes were temporal kings at this time. Doesn’t invalidate the point. It wouldn’t surprise to find that most of the deaths in the Inquisition were to acquire property or settle a grudge.
Henry VIII killed plenty of Catholic for that.

Here's my prediction: Kim Davis will become a Catholic before all is said and done.

That's ridiculous. No Kentucky Pentecostal is going to become an evolutionist.

I am a Roman Catholic for nigh onto seventy years now

What kind of Catholic? Latin or Eastern Orthodox, or do you deny the title Catholic to the latter? If an RC, are you one that wholly affirms Vatican Two reforms and the present pope and his social teaching, and rejects the premise that RCs are to seek to ascertain the validity of modern teaching by examination of past teaching, and or the magisterial level of each teaching to see if he may dissent, but are to just submit to all the church teaches, with present teaching defining the past? Such as this RC basically judges you are to do:

Praxis [practice] is quite simple for faithful Catholics: give your religious assent of intellect and will to Catholic doctrine, whether it is infallible or not. That's what our Dogmatic Constitution on the Church demands, that's what the Code of Canon Laws demand, and that is what the Catechism itself demands. Heb 13:17 teaches us to "obey your leaders and submit to them." This submission is not contingent upon inerrancy or infallibility. - http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?p=1565864#post1565864

(Note that within this category are variations.)

For to do less creates division. As one poster wryly commented,

The last time the church imposed its judgment in an authoritative manner on "areas of legitimate disagreement," the conservative Catholics became the Sedevacantists and the Society of St. Pius X, the moderate Catholics became the conservatives, the liberal Catholics became the moderates, and the folks who were excommunicated, silenced, refused Catholic burial, etc. became the liberals. The event that brought this shift was Vatican II; conservatives then couldn't handle having to actually obey the church on matters they were uncomfortable with, so they left. — Nathan, http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com/blog/2005/05/fr-michael-orsi-on-different-levels-of.html

Or are you one of the RCs which determines whether modern teaching requires assent based upon his judgment of its conformity with past papal teaching, and thus are accused by the other party of basically being as Protestants? And thus they reject parts of V2 as well as latest papal encyclical as a whole from requiring religious assent (excludes public dissent), although past papal teaching requires assent to all such ?

Note that within this category are variations.

and always have been and shall be one to the moment of my death.

So a RC is forbidden by no less than Trent from assuming they will never fall, but they can assert they will never leave the Catholic church? Which either means one can be a Catholic and die outside of grace, or that you are engaging in unholy presumption, or that Trent is wrong. Of course, the Scriptural reality is that as a Catholic you are part of the largest deformation of the NT church , which at best is basically invisible in Scripture, and in rare cases means that to remain in Rome means that one will end up in Hell, to their eternal horror. I pray God grants them repentance.

That is not criticism of your faith or of anyone else's faith that I do not share fully.

So you can take a stand for one faith which claims to be the one true one without (implicitly at lest) criticizing another? Or do you deny the exclusive claims of Rome, or even the historical teaching of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus? Some even are glad for the Inquisitions which dealt with "heretics" by the use of torture and death, and obedience to the pope required extermination of the heretics. Again, just what kind of Catholic are you? You seem to want everyone to get along, but you differ with those in your own church.

In the early days of Christianity, it was said by our mutual enemies that you will know the Christians.

Which Scripture tells us, and likewise testifies that NT Christianity was without an perpetual infallible papal office to whom all the church looked to as such in Rome, or Eucharistic belief as being same sacrifice as Calvary, and thus the source and summit of the Christian life around which sacrament all else revolved, by which one obtains spiritual life by literally consuming the "real" body and blood of Christ, or praying to created beings in Heaven,, or a class of clergy distinctively titled "priests," or baptism effecting justification on the basis of one's own holiness, thus again becoming good enough through postmortem purifying torments in purgatory, etc.

But which were told to "earnestly contend for the faith once delivered," (Jude 1:3) which is revealed in Scripture as supreme.

They are the ones that LOVE ONE ANOTHER. And so we should always be. I wish that people here of whatever persuasion would calm down, respect one another even when we belong to differing faiths, demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ in our daily lives and in exchanges with one another.

Which i do try to do, but the same love that is shown in changing a flat tire in the temporal realm is also to be shown in regards to the eternal spiritual interest of a soul. Both for salvation and to glorify God via worship in spirit and truth. And thus the Lord corrected by Scripture those who sat in the seat of Moses. (Mk. 7:2-16) and Paul contended with the same.

When Methodist Churches in the New Haven area no longer had pastors worthy of respect and instead all had relentlessly leftist pastors, Hilda repaired to her living room and her easy chair and took up her beloved Bible and read it lovingly digesting every word until the words were worn off the pages.

Yet infallible teaching of Rome damns non-RC souls to Hell, and some of your own brethren here affirm such must convert to Catholicism to be saved. Thus the question remains, just what kind of Catholic are you?

Heaven would be a far, far poorer place without the wonderful Reformed Christians who post here and, when I was in coma from Thanksgiving to Christmas last year, many of them and many of my fellow Catholics here prayed me back to a semblance of normal life despite my heart trouble, diabetes and kidney failure. For the first seventeen days of that coma, I was in Intensive Care and I was not expected to survive until the next day. With the help of those prayers and of the God that you and I worship, I can drive 20 miles each way to dialysis three times a week.

I am sorry for your health problems, and glad for they mercies yet realized, and may you see God's salvific mercy on your body and soul. it is very apparent that you are unlike the majority of RCs we deal with here, and who express scorn for us while incessantly promoting Rome, but which (as a veteran of the RF by God's grace) I have never seen you reprove. And as foe ecumenism, the fact is that while we often can enjoy fellowship of the Spirit with other evangelicals of various different churches, due to a share transformative conversion, and in which Christ and His word is central, we rarely realize this with RCs, since they find security in a church and Mary, and trust in their baptism and that they will merit eternal life and enter glory thru purgatory, and know of a day of transformative regeneration. Thus if we esteem the word of God and the salvation of souls, then we will contend for doctrine.

I used to rail and rage against the more aggressive Reformed Christians here when they argued against Catholicism. You know what? I grew up at an advanced age. I stopped arguing like that and trading insult for insult.

Railing and raging and resorting to ad hominem arguments is all to typical of RCs in particular, but which is not necessarily the same as contending via evidence and reason against the promotion of Rome as the one true church, which has constantly been done here. Do you expect us to stay silent? If an imam gave Davis a Qur'an, and then accepted it to pass on then would be out of line in criticizing it? Pray to Mary is heretical.

First of all, I respect your absolute right to choose your own faith commitment. I'm not going to stop being Catholic and you likely aren't going to leave your faith behind either. Let's try to get along anyway.

So "getting along" means I cannot express criticism of false doctrine? That simply is not the kind of " getting along" approved by Scripture.

I'd love to see the entire world be Tridentine Roman Catholics but it is not going to happen any more than there will be a worldwide Caliphate under Mohammed el Kaboomski converting the whole world to Islam

Both would be a damnable error.

When the Inquisition burned Jan Hus and others who were Christian victims, the Inquisition also burned Catholics such as St. Joan of Arc and corruptly caused the death by being hanged, drawn and quartered and beheaded Sir William Wallace, the noble Scottish rebel and burned the Dominican monk of Florence, Fr. Savanarola for resisting the authority of the absolutely notorious Pope Alexander VI.

But if obedience to the pope and councils back then meant engaging in such then how can obeying the pope necessarily now be correct. And if each RCs must judge whether RC teaching is valid or nor, then how are they different from evangelicals who do so?

I agree with Alberta's Child that Kim Davis is soon to swim the Tiber, like many before her, maybe her husband as well. Many swim the Tiber in the opposite direction as well. Is that any skin off your nose?

The skin would be off her nose, and more than that, and would join the list of those who stood against compromise in one major issue but succumbed to another major one. And she would be joining a church which counts even proabortion, prosodomite pils as members in life and in death.

We should all: Catholic, Reformed and others stand in solidarity with her, regardless of her denomination, for her brave witness

Working together to stop Muslim invaders or the link, due to some shared basic convictions, is not the same as agreeing on other critical aspects which are the alternative to it.

nd in opposition to US District Court judge David Bunning, allegedly a Catholic although I see no Catholicism in the wretch.

Which is merely your opinion, while your church shows hers by treating such as members, joining the Teddy K Caths.

I would gladly see Bunning arrested, jailed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to extraordinary time in jail or something more permanent, not because he is a heretic or a schismatic but because he deprives people like Kim Davis of her God given right to freedom of worship in violation of his judicial oath of office.

Note in his judgment, or apparently SCOTUS. And under the RC model, we are to obey the supreme interpretive magistrate.

He is no more Catholic and no more Christian than Nancy Pelosi, the late Ted Kennedy,

But whom your pope wrote a nice letter to, thanking him for his prayers and we see not a word of rebuke, before giving him a glorious church funeral. Which in-deed manifests Rome';s interpretation of canon law, for all to follow.

Off with their heads, each and every one and NOT for heresy but for crimes for which each citizen should expect to be hanged.

And the "crimes" you cite are due to belief, and you just restrict such hanging to secular power, and the like sentiment is apparently held by many RCs toward the likes of us. You are just one brand of RC in a church of varied RCs professing unity, and condemning disunity.

I would certainly condemn "separation of Church and state"

And RCs here have advocated for a RC monarchy, under which we would be censored.

which appears nowhere in the text of the US Constitution or its First Amendment

But it does forbid the theocratic state which Rome used to effect her rule, and is what was being avoided.

Please recall that Maryland was originally a Catholic colony but, when the leaders of Maryland invited Protestants into the colony as citizens thereof, they took over, terminated the status as the Catholic colony...burned St. Mary's to the ground and plowed its wreckage under the ground

And how was Rome different in its past?

It was never meant to be a weapon against religion as such as the ACLU advocates.

Yet implicitly informally expressing the Christian faith implicit in its Founders and populace.

I respect your zeal, your commitment to our Savior, to His Father in heaven and to the Holy Spirit and to Scripture. I may disagree with this or that tenet of your Faith but I will not insult you over any differences. If you are persistent enough or rude, I will simply walk away. That would be a shame not because I cannot convert you or because you cannot convert me but because we will be unable to stand shoulder to shoulder fighting the good fight against our actual common enemies for the wide cornucopia of beliefs that we DO share.

That is Francisology, but Christians also held to a shared morality with the Jews of the 1st c., yet those who preach a false gospel are accused, which Rome does and is, though some within of simply faith know God, and if I care about souls and Truth then i must seek their salvation and contend for the Truth, for the glory of God, and by His grace.

Davis’ parents are Roman Catholic. The Rosary is being given to them.

I know that, so if a Hindu have them prayer beads (also used in Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Sikhism and the Bahá'í Faith to mark the repetitions of prayers, chants or devotions) should they give them to members of that faith or others?

Or do you really think they are Scriptural? Or that they must be?

Don’t expect a reply from Black Elk.

That is an awesome post. You have obviously thought deeply on the subjects you have raised. I may not be able in one post to respond to all of the many natters you have raised. Some are easy for me. Others are going to really stimulate thought. It will be apparent that my mind is less disciplined than yours appears to be. You may get the better of me on some points. I seldom concede that to others here. I will usually defer to some few of my fellow Catholics whom I regard as more scholarly or more informed than I. I also tend to be a bit wordy. I may have to write a book.

First, I am a Roman Catholic since my baptism as an infant. I attended a parish parochial school where the nuns who taught me were simply high school alumnae until 8th grade when the nun had a master's degree and was working on her doctorate. She was vastly more liberal than the rest but I and two other boys were not required, indeed were not allowed to attend her classes but had to be in the school building unsupervised. We were required to complete the basic curriculum on our own and also to read a complete list of about thirty academically or religiously relevant books. As the nun told us, your reputation precedes you, you pay no attention in class and keep one textbook after another open in your desks. The year's work takes you about three weeks then you are bored and disrupt classes for the other students. Not in my classroom and you will be working hard for a change and be tested on that expanded curriculum.

Many of the nuns told us about a great Catholic Senator in Washington who would probably become the first great Catholic president. These nuns were registered as hereditary Democrats when you could be moral and a patriot and a Democrat all at once. But they were not talking about JFK. They were talking about Senator Joseph McCarthy and asking us to tell this good news to our mommies and daddies.

Of the three of us, I and another were admitted to and graduated a Jesuit prep school. That was so long ago that our Jebbies were still quite Catholic. God's Marines is what they were called. The third guy was from a disreputable project family but he was the smartest of the three of us. He dropped out of a public high school in freshman or sophomore year and I discovered him hustling for substantial winnings in a pool hall. I have not seen him since. When we were at the end of 8th grade, his mother was arrested for prostitution.

The Jesuit order had started to change drastically for the worse when the reprehensible Pedro Arrupe was elected Superior General (1965-1983) and proceeded to ruin the order and turn it into the equivalent of Satan's Marines. There are a few truly Catholic Jesuits but very few. Arrupe was terminated by St. John Paul II. In the US, the first province to go bad (I think) was the New York province centered on Fordham University.

I then went to Fairfield University for about three semesters but the Church and the Jebbies were going nuts at that point because of the evils at Vatican II. John XXIII and Paul VI were unworthy successors to Pius XII and unworthy predecessors to St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. We have to some extent reverted to the bad old days of 1958 to 1978 under Francis or so it seems.

I do regard the Eastern Orthodox as part of the Church although they have been in schism for about 1,000 years now since the days of Michael Celarius at Constantinople. Our differences, as I understand it, are verrry few. The Orthodox have Apostolic Succession to validate their Holy Orders. They have a legitimate and quite impressive and very reverent liturgy and, IIRC, Catholics may meet their Mass obligations by attending Orthodox Masses. I believe that the Orthodox do not regard the Roman Catholic Church as being in communion with them and I believe they do not therefore welcome us to receive the Holy Eucharist. I believe that we Catholics have no problem with the Orthodox receiving the Eucharist in our Churches. If any Catholic knows otherwise, I will defer to him or her.

IIRC, we Catholics regard only the Catholic and Orthodox clergy as capable of consecrating bread and wine and making present on the altar the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ. Holy Rollers had more dignity than some Novus Ordo priests and congregants.

Then there was the degeneracy in preaching and theology, each liberal priest acting as his own pope. The seminaries emptied. The pews emptied. Catholics who had confessed their sins weekly no longer felt moved to confess to Fr. Feelgood. They were told that their sins were not really sins, particularly in the area of birth control. This subject of post-Vatican II deforms requires major book length treatment and the books are out there if you are interested.

I tend to deny the title of Catholic to what amount to public heretics posing as Catholic. If John Kerr wants to act like a Unitarian, he should formalize it and stop calling himself Catholic. Nancy Pelosi, ditto. The late Ted Kennedy likewise. I won't repeat the entire roster of those "Catholics" whose pro-abortion actions in public life public life excommunicate them latae sententiae (automatically without further ado). We don't do any more the traditional cathedral ceremony of bell, book and candle to excommunicate people anymore. On extremely rare occasions, a bishop will excommunicate an individual and send the individual a letter so informing him or her. The only example I remember in recent years was a woman who ran Planned Parenthood and its abortion mill tried to enroll her child in a Catholic grammar school. The child was expelled because of the identity of his/her mother and the fact that the child might try to convince fellow students that the mother and Planned Barrenhood were a good person and organization respectively. The mother was excommunicated by the bishop of Providence. All too rare.

The Te+aching Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church is a gold mine of wisdom and Faith. As to "social issues," such as labor, our obligations to the poor, the sick. the elderly, etc., I would look to Pope Leo XIII's distinguished encyclical Rerum Novarum written in about 1893 which rocked the entire world with 40 tightly written pages. He was denounced as a communist and as a tool of greedy capitalists and everything in between. Many encyclicals by later popes were written by several subsequent popes to expand upon and update the teachings of Leo XIII. They include Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI and Centissimus Anno of St. John Paul II, respectively on Rerum Novarum's 25th and 100th anniversary. That line of encyclicals is part of what makes Catholics truly Catholic if they heed them.

As to the hijinks of Vatican Ii and afterward, I would look to two documents by Pope St. Pius X (1903-1914) both published in 1907: the syllabus of errors called Lamentabile Sane and the encyclical Pascendi Domenici Gregis, generally rendered in English as On the Errors of the Modernists. He specifically excommunicated the ring leaders including Fr. George Tyrell, SJ. Th34 encyclical is an extremely worthwhile compendium of Catholic beliefs and the attack on them by the Modernist heretics. He called Modernism "the synthesis of all heresies." There was an anti-Modernist Oath and a requirement that each diocese root out the Modernist heresy ASAP and formally report to the Vatican on the progress achieved at least every three years. Much of Pius X's laudable work was gutted by his successor Benedict XV of less than happy memory. Vatican II witnessed the return of Modernism but we lacked a St. Pius X to to crack down on the heretics when they returned. The Church has beset by bitter division in the clergy and in the pews ever since.

As you will see, my response is going to be very lengthy and will have to be broken up into several or many posts. daniel1212:

I am not as young or healthy as once I was. I have been at this now for five hours and I must attend to other posts and matters. Hold your response for now because I will want to respond to whatever you post to me and that will make it hard for me to finish this response. Please be patient with this old fellow, afflicted by medical issues galore. I won't be able to continue until tomorrow evening because tomorrow is a dialysis day and I have to pick up a pair of orthopedic shoes before dialysis. Friday will be rather free other than grocery shopping and my wife will be in Michigan on an academic errand until Saturday evening. I have dialysis again on Saturday.

One more thing that I will address at greater length in a later post. My Church has taught since at least Trent that Indians in, say Nebraska, in the tenth century before there were missionaries or Bibles or sacraments available to them were not created by God to inevitably go to hell for not being baptized by water. Such an Indian who was a righteous man or woman, dying after a long and virtuous good life and believing in a Supreme Being whom they called the Great Spirit might enter heaven.

Believing that, I would be astounded to find only Catholics in heaven, if I am fortunate enough to find myself in heaven. I cannot imagine that.

I may be suffering a senior moment but I am failing to grasp the meaning of the last sentence of the first paragraph of your post. Please explain.

Vatican II was a pastoral council and not a doctrinal council. No declaration of infallibility either papal or conciliar with the public agreement of the pope was attached to the documents of that council. I am sure that I would agree with a lot of the verbiage in those documents, not all, I am not required to believe much of what the documents say. OTOH, the documents tend to repeat a lot of pr4eviously defined dogma. That is the style of such documents. They are very similar stylistically to legal briefs.

In traditionalist circles we tell each other:

Q. What was the Third Secret given by Our Lady to the three children Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia at Fatima in 1917?

A. Whatever you do, don't hold a council!

Please pray for the further restoration of my health as I will pray for whatever is important to you consistent with the will of God whom both of us serve. May God bless you and yours.

There is a great deal of truth to what you posted. There was q lot of that going on in those centuries on all sides.

Did you read his address to Congress? It was all about praising the United States and the servants of the people that she had produced, including Abraham Lincoln.

I agree with your prediction.

The rosary is certainly not Scriptural except for the Our Father which was given by Jesus Christ in Scripture and the first half of the Hail Mary which were the Scriptural words of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation. All that which pertains to Christianity need not be contained in Scripture, a major difference between Catholicism and Reformed Christianity.

Why not? See #s 18, 35 and 26.