I could not agree more!
Non-pope Karol Wojtyla at "Mass" in Papua, New Guinea (May 8, 1984) where the epistle is read by a bare-breasted woman.
Posted on 06/15/2016 7:13:04 PM PDT by ebb tide
Editor’s note: This is part 3 of a series examining Pope Francis’ papacy over the last three years. See part 1 here and part 2 here.
June 15, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – It’s one of the most frequent talking points of Pope Francis. It’s definitely part of his appeal for the media and simultaneously one of the most hurtful things for those inside the Church for whom the faith means everything. I’m speaking of the Pope’s penchant for castigating faithful adherents of the Catholic faith as “obsessed,” “doctors of the law,” “neo-pelagian,” “self-absorbed,” “restorationist,” “fundamentalist,” “rigid,” “ideological,” “hypocritical,” and much more.
The effect of the all-too-frequent barrage from the lips of the Pontiff himself is potentially deadly. It confirms the prejudice of the world against faithful Christians as the media constantly portrays them – as hypocrites and worse. Moreover, it permits the false categorization of adherent Christians with fundamentalist Islamic radicals who need to be suppressed to ensure public safety.
Who can blame the media for such comparisons when the Pope has made them himself? “Fundamentalism is a sickness that we find in all religions,” said the Pope in November while flying home from Africa. “Among Catholics there are many, not a few, many, who believe to hold the absolute truth,” he added. “They go ahead by harming others with slander and defamation, and they do great harm. … And it must be combated.”
Given the inordinate amount of time he spends condemning them, it would be ludicrous to suggest the Pope is only speaking of the infinitesimal number of practicing Catholics who do have a deranged puritanical bent.
It has now been freely admitted by Vatican authorities that there was an extreme liberal group of Cardinals known as the St. Gallen group who backed the papal election of Cardinal Bergoglio. But even if Pope Francis has an ideological dispute with conservative Cardinals such as Cardinal Raymond Burke, his repeated public criticisms against Catholics who hold to the “absolute truth” is potentially a great danger to the faithful.
In addition to the fact that Pope Francis’ remarks along these lines contradict his predecessors (see end of this article), they are a grave danger because secular authorities are all too willing to crush freedom of religion for Christians with the excuse that they are stomping out dangerous fundamentalism. With the Pope’s own words they can equate Catholics who would hold to all of the Church’s teachings with Islamic or Hindu fundamentalists who employ violence and torture as means of conquest.
Recall the chilling words of Princeton Professor Robert George in his famous address, “No more comfortable Catholicism.” He noted that the world has no animosity toward a nominal Catholic who just goes to Mass, but it’s much different when it comes to one who “actually believes what the Church teaches on issues such as marriage and sexual morality and the sanctity of human life.”
He said that it is still possible to be a “safe” or “comfortable Catholic” today “if one in fact does not believe what the Church teaches, or, for now at least, even if one does believe those teachings but is prepared to be completely silent about them.” Professor George warned, however, that there are severe consequences awaiting those who will not yield to the pressure. “To be a witness to the Gospel today is to make oneself a marked man or woman,” he said.
It is exactly that distinction -- between faithful and nominal Catholics -- that the world is reading into Pope Francis’ regular haranguing of “fundamentalist” Catholics as opposed to others. The frequency is such that it is beyond the scope of this article to point to all the instances in the last three years of the pontificate. But these few should exemplify the point (emphasis added throughout):
- From the September 19, 2013 Jesuit magazine interview: “If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing... Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”
- Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) released November 26, 2013: “A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. … Since it is based on carefully cultivated appearances, it is not always linked to outward sin; from without, everything appears as it should be. But if it were to seep into the Church, it would be infinitely more disastrous than any other worldliness which is simply moral.”
- June 2014 interview with Spanish-language magazine La Vanguardia: “The three religions, we have our fundamentalist groups, small in relation to all the rest. A fundamentalist group, although it may not kill anyone, although it may not strike anyone, is violent. The mental structure of fundamentalists is violence in the name of God.”
- In his October 19, 2014 closing address to Extraordinary Synod on the Family, Pope Francis spoke of “traditionalists” with their “hostile inflexibility,” and their failure to allow themselves to be “surprised by God.”
- In the January 2015 book-length interview, The Name of God is Mercy, Pope Francis says “scholars of the law” are “the principal opposition to Jesus; they challenge him in the name of doctrine.” And he adds, “This approach is repeated throughout the long history of the Church.”
- In a September 2015 radio interview with Radio Milenium, Pope Francis said, “Fundamentalists keep God away from accompanying his people, they divert their minds from him and transform him into an ideology. So in the name of this ideological god, they kill, they attack, destroy, slander. Practically speaking, they transform that God into a Baal, an idol. … No religion is immune from its own fundamentalisms. In every religion there will be a small group of fundamentalists whose work is to destroy for the sake of an idea, and not reality.”
- In his closing address to the Synod on the Family in October of 2015, the Pope condemned “the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families."
- Pope Francis’ homily on January 18, 2016 reads: “Christians who say ‘it’s always been done that way,’ and stop there have hearts closed to the surprises of the Holy Spirit. They are idolaters and rebels who will never arrive at the fullness of the truth.”
- The official Vatican radio report on his homily of June 9, 2016 reads: “Pope Francis warned on Thursday against an excessive rigidity, saying those within the Church who tell us ‘it’s this or nothing’ are heretics and not Catholics.”
Pope Francis has himself recognized the increasing “educated” or “polite persecution” that seeks to restrict rights to freedom of religion and conscientious objection. What he evidently does not see is that his rhetoric against Catholics who he perceives as “fundamentalist” is providing fodder for the enemies of Truth to oppress faithful Catholics, even violently. Let us pray with urgency that Pope Francis might have his sight restored.
Quotes from Church documents and his predecessors that run counter to the sentiments expressed by Pope Francis (emphasis added throughout):
- St. Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2:14: “Therefore, brethren, stand fast: and hold the traditions, which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle.”
- The canon of the Mass in the Extraordinary Form as prayed for over 1000 years noted that the Mass was offered the Church’s hierarchy and “all orthodox believers of the catholic and apostolic faith.”
- Speaking to bishops of Latin America in 1979, Pope St. John Paul II said: “To be watchful for purity of doctrine, the basis in building up the Christian community, is therefore, together with the proclamation of the Gospel, the primary and irreplaceable duty of the Pastor, of the Teacher of the faith. How often Saint Paul emphasized this, convinced as he was of the seriousness of the accomplishment of this duty (cf. 1Tim 1:3 –7; 18 –20; 4:11, 16; 2Tim 1:4–14). Over and above unity in love, unity in truth is always urgent for us.”
- In 1984 Pope St. John Paul II told bishops from Chile: “Our firmness will come from this solid foundation, since the Church today, despite all the difficulties that encircle it, cannot speak in a way different from that which Christ spoke. For this reason, the Church, especially the Pastors, should be united around the Absolute Truth, that is God, and proclaim it in all its integrity and purity.”
- Pope St. John Paul II wrote in the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor: “An attitude of this sort (one who makes his own weakness the criterion of the truth about the good) corrupts the morality of society as a whole, since it encourages doubt about the objectivity of the moral law in general and a rejection of the absoluteness of moral prohibitions regarding specific human acts, and it ends up by confusing all judgments about values.”
- In a speech made in the Vatican Basilica on the eve of his election to the papacy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said: “Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine’, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.”
- Under Pope Benedict, in 2007 the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith taught: “For a long time, the reason for evangelization has not been clear to many among the Catholic faithful. It is even stated that the claim to have received the gift of the fullness of God’s revelation masks an attitude of intolerance and a danger to peace.”
I am not a Catholic. I am a Protestant and it is your business— not mine. We are all believers in the Savior. But you need to fire this jerk.
Matthew 5:19
“Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
When traditionalists quote John Paul 2, the world is topsy turvy.
My plan is to fight today’s battles, win them, and then work backwards.
I too am a Protestant and I totally agree with you. This man is as insane as the idiot in the White House. I think both of them are puppets of that other maniac, George Soros. Pope Francis needs to be fired.
That dude is sick in the head.
They were both elected. They both need unelected because of fraud.
Daily I am shocked at the lack of questions from Catholics for this matter and this "Pope's " bs....but then I am a Protestant in every sense of the word who thinks the Bible comes first and have never really had a grand understanding for the things Catholics teach that the Bible does not, nor have I had much respect for the Catholic Church besides its amazing art, which this guy has lessoned greatly.
The Left is pulling out all the stops. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Save
I could not agree more!
Non-pope Karol Wojtyla at "Mass" in Papua, New Guinea (May 8, 1984) where the epistle is read by a bare-breasted woman.
They want to destroy the Office of the Papacy as well and replace it with a commission with a rotating presiding head - but now Bergoglio seems to want to hang in there so he can be the lesser of the two beasts of the Apocalypse, the prophet of the antichrist.
Ratzinger was no great improvement as he had attacked the Bodily Resurrection of our Lord in his writings and outright denied any actual resurrection of soul let alone body for the Just at the Last Judgment. They "will only be remembered in a special way in the mind of God" according to the heretical pig. His writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in the 1950's as suspect of heresy.
The Church was infiltrated and there has not been a valid pope, i.e a CATHOLIC one, since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958.
Bravo. High five.
I like how when Pope John Paul II was alive, the Baptists would say, “Finally, you have a pope that knows how to pope!”
It is sad how Pope Benedict XVI has been benched for the present loser.
The whole world groans under the friendly smiles of Bergoglio, Merkel and Obama.
“Is the Pope Catholic?” is no longer a certainty. Now I’m wondering where bears do their business.
They indeed both work for the ultimate satanic Cabal for which Soros is just a scurvy front-man, a messenger boy.
There has not been a Catholic Pope, i.e. a valid one, one who is not a heretic, since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. The plot of centuries reached its culmination with the infiltrating heretical moles outwardly seizing the throne of Peter.
By Divine Law and by Catholic teaching they are all null and void, whether a heretic before election or after, but in all these cases since 1958, BEFORE election. If there was a Catholic secular power, again by Catholic teaching we could appeal to that president or monarch to rid us of the lot of them.
Heresy, apostasy or schism separate one from the Faith and hence the Church and these miscreants did so by their own acts and thus were ineligible (or would fall from Office) by their own acts. if they had not committed offenses against the Faith then no matter how lousy they were personally they would still be the pope(s).
Jorge Bergoglio is NOT a Catholic, therefore by his own actions, he is NOT the pope. One cannot be the earthly head of the Mystical Body of Christ, if one is not even a member of that body oneself.
6. In addition, [by this Our Constitution, which is to remain valid in perpetuity We enact, determine, decree and define:-]
that if ever at any time it shall appear that any Bishop, even if he be acting as an Archbishop, Patriarch or Primate; or any Cardinal of the aforesaid Roman Church, or, as has already been mentioned, any legate, or even the Roman Pontiff, prior to his promotion or his elevation as Cardinal or Roman Pontiff, has deviated from the Catholic Faith or fallen into some heresy:
(i) the promotion or elevation, even if it shall have been uncontested and by the unanimous assent of all the Cardinals, shall be null, void and worthless;
(ii) it shall not be possible for it to acquire validity (nor for it to be said that it has thus acquired validity) through the acceptance of the office, of consecration, of subsequent authority, nor through possession of administration, nor through the putative enthronement of a Roman Pontiff, or Veneration, or obedience accorded to such by all, nor through the lapse of any period of time in the foregoing situation;
(iii) it shall not be held as partially legitimate in any way;
(iv) to any so promoted to be Bishops, or Archbishops, or Patriarchs, or Primates or elevated as Cardinals, or as Roman Pontiff, no authority shall have been granted, nor shall it be considered to have been so granted either in the spiritual or the temporal domain;
(v) each and all of their words, deeds, actions and enactments, howsoever made, and anything whatsoever to which these may give rise, shall be without force and shall grant no stability whatsoever nor any right to anyone;
(vi) those thus promoted or elevated shall be deprived automatically, and without need for any further declaration, of all dignity, position, honour, title, authority, office and power.
...................................................
St Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church, "De Romano Pontifice", ("On the Roman Pontiff"), liber II, caput 30:
"For, in the first place, it is proven with arguments from authority and from reason that the manifest heretic is "ipso facto" deposed. The argument from authority is based on St. Paul (Titus, c. 3), who orders that the heretic be avoided after two warnings, that is, after showing himself to be manifestly obstinate - which means before any excommunication or judicial sentence. And this is what St. Jerome writes, adding that the other sinners are excluded from the Church by sentence of excommunication, but the heretics exile themselves and separate themselves by their own act from the body of Christ. Now, a Pope who remains Pope cannot be avoided, for how could we be required to avoid our own head? How can we separate ourselves from a member united to us?
"This principle is most certain. The non-Christian cannot in any way be Pope, as Cajetan himself admits (ib. c. 26). The reason for this is that he cannot be head of what he is not a member; now he who is not a Christian is not a member of the Church, and a manifest heretic is not a Christian, as is clearly taught by St. Cyprian (lib. 4, epist. 2), St. Athanasius (Scr. 2 cont. Arian.), St. Augustine (lib. de great. Christ. cap. 20), St. Jerome (contra Lucifer.) and others; therefore the manifest heretic cannot be Pope.
Est ergo quinta opinio vera, papam haereticum manifestum per se desinere esse papam et caput, sicut per se desinit esse christianus et membrum corporis Ecclesiae; quare ab, Ecclesia posse eum judicari et puniri. Haec est sententia omnium veterum Patrum, qui docent, haereticos manifestos mox amittere omnem jurisdictionem.
"Therefore, the true opinion is the fifth, according to which the Pope who is manifestly a heretic ceases by himself to be Pope and head, in the same way as he ceases to be a Christian and a member of the body of the Church; and for this reason he can be judged and punished by the Church. This is the opinion of all the ancient Fathers, who teach that manifest heretics immediately lose all jurisdiction,
Fundamentum hujus sententiae est. quoniam haereticus manifestos nullo modo est membrum Ecclesiae, idest, neque animo neque corpore, sive neque unione interna, neque externa.
"The foundation of this argument is that the manifest heretic is not in any way a member of the Church, that is, neither spiritually nor corporally, which signifies that he is not such by internal union nor by external union.
Explanation of the Catholic principle involved in Comment #16.
Wojtyla kissing the Muslim Koran on May 14, 1999
Apocalypse Of Saint John 2:9-10
[9] I know thy tribulation and thy poverty, but thou art rich: and thou art blasphemed by them that say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. [10] Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer. Behold, the devil will cast some of you into prison that you may be tried: and you shall have tribulation ten days. Be thou faithful until death: and I will give thee the crown of life.
"The Roman Pontiff has no superior but God. Who, therefore, could cast him out or trample him under foot – since of the pope it is said ‘gather thy flock into thy fold’? Truly, he should not flatter himself about his power, nor should he rashly glory in his honor and high estate, because the less he is judged by man, the more he is judged by God.
"Still the less can the Roman Pontiff glory [Minus dico] because he can be judged by men, or rather, can be shown to be already judged, if for example he should wither away into heresy; because he who does not believe is already judged.
"In such a case it should be said of him: ‘If salt should lose its savor, it is good for nothing but to be cast out and trampled under foot by men'."
Code of Canon Law (1917), Canon 188.4:
Canon 188: "Ob tacitam renuntiationem ab ipso iure admissam quaelibet officia vacant ipso facto et sine
ulla declaratione, si clerus ... (4) a fide catholica publice defecerit."
Canon 188: "There are certain causes which effect the tacit resignation of an office, which resignation is accepted in advance by operation of law, and hence is effective without any declaration. These causes are:
(4) if he has publicly fallen away from the Catholic faith."
St. Alphonsus de Liguori on the fate of a heretical pope:
"Del resto, si Dio permettesse che un papa fosse notoriamente eretico e contumace, egli cesserebbe d'essere papa, e vacherebbe il pontificato."
--"Verita della Fede", part 3, ch. 8, no. 10.
In: Opere dommatiche di S. Alfonso de Liguori (Torino, G. Marietti, 1848), p. 720. (Opere di S. Alfonso Maria de Liguori, v. 8)
"For the rest, if God should permit that a Pope should become a notorious and contumacious heretic, he would cease to be Pope, and the pontificate would be vacant."
St. Francis de Sales on papal infallibility and heresy:
"En l'ancienne loy le grand pretre ne portait pas le rational si non quand il estoit revestu des habits pontificaux et qu'il entroit devant le Seigneur. Ainsi ne disons nous pas que le pape en ses opinions particulieres ne puisse errer comme fit Jean XXII, ou etre du tout heretique comme peut etre fut Honorius. Or quand il est heretique expres *ipso facto* il tombe de son grade hors de l'Eglise et l'Eglise le doit ou priver comme disent quelques uns, ou le declarer prive de son siege apostolique et dire comme fit St. Pierre: Episcopatum eius accipiat alter. Quand il erre en sa particuliere opinion il le faut enseigner, adviser, convaincre comme on fit a Jean XXII le quel tant s'en faut qu'il mourut opiniatre ou que pendant sa vie il determina aucune chose touchant son opinion, que pendant qu'il faysoit l'inquisition requise pour determiner en matiere de foy, il mourut, au recit de son successeur en l'Extravagante qui se commence *Benedictus Deus.*"
St. Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy (Tan Books), p. 388 (part II, art. VI, ch. 14)
"Under the ancient law the High Priest did not wear the Rational except when he was vested in the pontifical robes and was entering before the Lord. Thus we do not say that the Pope cannot err in his private opinions, as did John XXII; or be altogether a heretic, as perhaps Honorius was. Now when he is explicitly a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity out of the Church, and the Church must either deprive him, as some say, or declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See, and must say as St. Peter did: Let another take his bishopric (Acts I). When he errs in his private opinion he must be instructed, advised, convinced; as happened with John XXII, who was so far from dying obstinate or from determining anything during his life concerning his opinion, that he died whilest he was making the examination which is necessary for determining in a matter of faith, as his successor declared in the *Extravagantes* which begins Benedictus Deus." (Ib. p. 305-306)
St. Thomas Aquinas on loss of jurisdiction by heretics:
Summa, 2a 2ae, q. 39, art. 3. (Utrum schismatici habeant aliquam potestatem)
"...Potestas autem iurisdictionis est quae ex simplici iniunctione hominis confertur; et talis potestas non immobiliter adhaeret; unde in schismaticis et haereticis non manet; unde non possunt nec absolvere, nec excommunicare, nec indulgentias facere, aut aliquid huiusmodi; quod si fecerint, nihil est actum."
(Whether schismatics have any power.)
"...The power of jurisdiction, however [as opposed to the power of Orders, which he has just discussed], is that [power] which is conferred simply by the injunction of man; and this power does not adhere immovably; therefore it does not remain in schismatics and heretics. Hence they can neither absolve, nor excommunicate, nor grant indulgences, or anything of this sort. If they do this, the act is null."
Your shock is misplaced. Read the Catholic caucus threads.
Many of us Catholics have been calling for Francis to be deposed. Myself included.
Benedict’s resignation isn’t as completely complicated as it seems. He was being undercut by liberals in the Curia, he was getting older and less able to manage those battles, and he prayed about it and came to the conclusion he could serve the Church better in prayer.
God will judge the rightness of his actions. Meanwhile, we have a Pope who flirts with heresy and that cannot be borne.
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