Pope Francis wants a transformation of the papacy and a synodal Church

He actually is ignorant - without denying that he is evil, of course. He’s somebody with a painfully shallow background, both theologically and culturally, “educated” in a leftist backwater seminary right after the Council brought about the collapse of priestly education in general and the Jesuits in particular (who all went and dedicated themselves to liberation theology or being gay, evidenced by the fact that they were the order that had the highest number of AIDS patients). A number of the good, old-style intelligent and orthodox Jesuits left during that time, leaving the likes of Francis in charge.

He is crafty, underhanded and devious, however, as well as having the arrogance only a small mind can provide.

K
I don’t think I would describe what Francis is doing as Orthodox. When we hold synods we don’t stack then with neo-Marxists, bishops known to have covered up for sexual predators, and open advocates of sodomitical “marriage.” While there is a legitimate difference in both theology and praxis on subjects like marriage between Rome and Orthodoxy, I don’t know of any Orthodox bishop who has ever openly advocated that anyone should be allowed to take communion as long as their conscience says its OK, irrespective of the teaching of the Church. Nor would any Orthodox bishop be advocating communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. The revisionist Latin bishops keep saying they want to adopt our discipline, but they don’t. We may permit second marriages following a divorce and penance, but we don’t commune those who just remarry in front of the town clerk.

The real danger here is not that the Latins want to cut some slack to the divorced and remarried, but that they want to do away with essentially all Eucharistic discipline. I am sorry but that is not Orthodox! They want to say something that they have always understood to be a sin, is still a sin, but it’s OK to take Holy Communion anyway if your conscience tells you that what you are doing is right and that the Church’s teaching is wrong.

It is not Orthodoxy that this Pope seems to be trying to emulate so much as the Anglicans. IMHO the Roman Church is in a serious crisis.

Unfortunately our separated Latin brethren seem to be almost as much in horror of their church becoming conciliar, rather than monarchical — which *would* be a move toward Orthodoxy — as they are of Francis following the lead of their revisionist bishops on matters of remarriage and Eucharistic discipline.

You may be right that Francis wants to follow the Anglicans into total apostasy, rather than just trying to make the papacy into a normal patriarchate that acts on the basis of the advice of its Holy Synod, and what this synod of theirs recommends and how he acts on whatever recommendation is made will probably provide enough evidence to tell the difference.

I agree with TRD, NRx. He hit the nail on the head when he spoke of the monarchical system in the Latin Church. No matter what the Latins think, the danger isn’t so much who is sitting in this ad hoc synod or even what it wants to talk about. The danger is that there is no system to restore orthodoxy in theology or praxis if that synodal train goes off the rails. The Latin laity are NOT the guardians of orthodoxy the way we are. They have no “Great Axios” to give or withhold. I suspect they don’t want that system either.

NRx, suppose the upcoming Great and Holy Synod were to announce that henceforth same sex marriages would be sanctioned and that the Latin notion of the Immaculate Conception was now dogma for us. How long do you think it would take for the Laos tou Theou to give their Great “OXI” and that would quite literally be the end of those marriages and that “dogma”?

Big, big difference.

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