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POPE FRANCIS AS HISTORIAN
First Things ^ | March 23, 2017 | Bronwen Catherine McShea

Posted on 03/24/2017 6:51:14 PM PDT by ebb tide

During a friendly meeting on January 19 with an ecumenical delegation from Finland, Pope Francis affirmed his commitment to reunion with Lutheran Christians by offering an historical claim about the great German reformer: “The intention of Martin Luther five hundred years ago was to renew the Church, not divide her.” A day or so before, news had begun circulating that Vatican City would honor the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses with a special postage stamp. And earlier this fall, the pope praised Luther for having re-focused the Church’s attentions on the centrality of Scripture, blaming subsequent divisions between Catholics and Lutherans not on anything the reformer himself had done, but on those of us who “closed in on ourselves out of fear or bias with regard to the faith which others profess with a different accent and language.”

The pope’s recent forays into early modern history have taken him not only to Reformation Germany, but also to China and India in the days of the first Jesuit missions. On October 24, in an extended conversation with the delegates of the 36th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, our first Jesuit pope contrasted contemporary Catholicism’s concern to protect indigenous cultures with the Eurocentric, imperialistic character of the colonial-era Church. Francis claimed that while a few Jesuit missionaries of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries had understood—following what Saint Paul himself, long before, had “clearly” understood from the Holy Spirit—“that the Gospel was to be inculturated in the Gentile peoples,” those missionaries were an exception to the rule:

Consider, for example, the experience of Matteo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili. They were pioneers, but a hegemonic conception of Roman centralism stopped that experience, interrupted it. It prevented a dialogue in which cultures were respected. And this happened because they interpreted social customs with a religious hermeneutic. Respect for the dead…was confused with idolatry.

It was not until very recently, Francis suggested, that Church leaders came to a “greater awareness … regarding indigenous peoples, to support the expression, the culture, of each one of them.”

As a Christian of the twenty-first century, I applaud and pray success for the Holy Father’s continuation of efforts by Lutherans, Catholics, and others who profess Jesus Christ to strive toward reunion in a spirit of prayerfulness and truth. I share, too, in the pope’s concerns that Christian evangelization should safeguard and strengthen the world’s richly diverse cultures, especially in the face of globalism’s often brutal march.

But as an historian, focused especially on the early modern world inhabited by Luther and the early Jesuit missionaries, I wince at the pope’s historical formulations. They do little justice to key actors and factors involved. They instrumentalize history, rather than take a receptive posture toward history’s lessons, in order to advance agendas of the present moment. While such utterances would be harmless had they appeared in one of my undergraduates’ term papers, they demand respectful critique when issued by a man bearing the title, and cachet, of a Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church.

Let us first scrutinize the pope’s claims about his fellow Jesuits, Ricci and Nobili. Ricci, who lived from 1552 to 1610, joined the Jesuits in Rome as a young man and developed a culturally adaptive approach to mission work in late Ming-dynasty China. Speaking and dressing like a Confucian scholar after years of cultural immersion and a trial-and-error apostolate, Ricci in 1601 became the first European welcomed into the emperor Wanli’s Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing. Nobili, also Italian but a generation younger than Ricci, lived from 1577 to 1656 and followed a similarly adaptive approach to mission work. He devoted his career to Hindu India and was based especially in Madurai, in what is today the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The degree to which Nobili embraced the traditions, dress, and lifestyle of the elite Brahmin caste in the region was scandalous even among his fellow Jesuits at the time, partly because of his primary rationale: He was concerned to gain a social foothold for his mission, and to reach the elites in and around Madurai with Christian teachings, and not to be shunned by them for his foreignness or, especially, for his association with poor, low-caste people. By contrast, other Catholic missionaries in the region accepted such exclusion from Hindu elite society as a necessary price for preaching Christ crucified, and “Blessed are the poor,” in that part of the world.

It is, first of all, anachronistic of the pope to attribute to these Jesuits—let alone Paul the Apostle—a project of “inculturation,” insofar as “inculturation,” especially along the bright, clear lines Francis draws, was not even conceived of until the mid-twentieth century. Despite seeing resemblances and roots, to be sure, scholars who have closely studied Ricci’s and Nobili’s approaches have been cautious about applying twentieth-century missiological frameworks to them. Francis X. Clooney, S.J., for example, has stressed that while Nobili adopted Brahmin dress, manners, and linguistic norms as a means of communicating with Hindu elites, when it came to the doctrines he sought to communicate, Nobili was staunchly Thomistic and Tridentine (some might say Eurocentric) in his understanding of the “unchanging truth” that he was, so to speak, clothing in Hindu “garb.”

More problematic, however, is the Holy Father’s remark that Ricci and Nobili’s pioneering missionary methods ran up against a “hegemonic conception of Roman centralism,” and an attendant hastiness by European missionaries overly “Roman” in orientation and perspective, to project religious significance, and especially “idolatry,” upon the culturally new and different. The pope here appears to believe, and to want others to believe, that the Holy Spirit’s true project of “inculturation” was thwarted, severely, during the era of what are called the Chinese and Malabar Rites Controversies. Following complaints from other religious orders’ missionaries (as well as from other Jesuits) and drawn-out debates in Europe over what in Chinese and Indian culture could be tolerated among the mission Christians, several popes in the early eighteenth century formally curtailed the accommodating approaches: Pope Clement XI ruled in 1715 against a number of longstanding Jesuit accommodations in China, in the bull Ex Illa Die, and his successor Pope Clement XII formalized restrictions on the Indian missions in a brief of 1734.

Regardless of who and what more accorded with the will of the Holy Spirit in these controversies—a matter beyond my historian’s ken—even a cursory examination of the individuals, events, and contexts in question reveals the tendentiousness of blaming a “hegemonic” bogeyman of “Roman centralism” for what unfolded. To begin with, it was significantly due to a reinvigorated, post-Renaissance Rome, curious about and intellectually reconciling with its own ancient, pagan past, that Italian Jesuits, formed at the Collegio Romano (today’s Gregorian), developed such pioneering approaches to mission work. It was in that very particular historical culture of Renaissance Rome that, as young men, these Jesuits had been formed by intensive, humanistic study of classical languages, literature, and history—training that provided them with foundational intellectual models and methods for their later study of Chinese and Indian languages and scholarly discourses. It is no coincidence, either, that humanistic Jesuit teachers encouraged Ricci and Nobili in the adventurous, discovery-oriented paths they chose, at a time when few Westerners—or few anywhere in the world—could conceptualize the gulfs of linguistic and cultural difference to be negotiated in Ricci’s years-long journey to Beijing or Nobili’s unlikely path to Madurai.

Furthermore, Rome played an ambivalent—not one-sidedly hostile—role leading up to the decisions of the two Clements, sometimes defending and protecting missionaries in the vein of Ricci and Nobili amidst strident opposition from other quarters of the Church. Pope Paul V, in 1615-16, authorized Jesuits in China to translate the Bible and the Mass into Mandarin, as well as to wear the hats of Confucian scholars while saying Mass. Later popes would, indeed, rule against Jesuit accommodations of rituals connected with cultic veneration of ancestors, among other practices deemed superstitious or idolatrous (this despite Jesuit protestations, which may have been disingenuous, that the rites had a purely social meaning for Confucian elites who were embracing Christianity). As for the Indian mission, Nobili’s major critics in his lifetime were other Jesuits in the country—Jesuits from Portugal, not Italy—and the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa, Cristóvão de Sá e Lisboa. The Archbishop of Goa was, in reality, directed more by the Portuguese Crown than by the Vatican, which was just beginning to attempt a centralized administration of overseas missions—and to extricate them from European imperial monarchies’ control—by instituting the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Pope Gregory XV permitted a number of Nobili’s contested practices—such as the wearing of particular garments, or participating in ritual bathings—against the wishes of these critics, on the condition that Nobili ensure their dissociation, among Christians engaging in them, from worship of Hindu deities in “idolatrous temples.” Later, during the most contentious, climactic era of the Malabar Rites Controversy, the cause for beatification and eventual sainthood of Fr. João de Brito—a Jesuit carrying forward with Nobili’s approach, one who had taken the Tamil name Arul Anandar and become a strict vegan—advanced in Rome with the express approval of Pope Benedict XIV. And Clement XII himself, following his brief of 1734, attempted to blunt the impact of that brief on the Madurai mission, by allowing some Jesuits to continue catering to Brahmin elites, despite his concern that accommodating the caste system violated the Christian view of man.

In view of such information, what do the pope’s October remarks about “a hegemonic conception of Roman centralism” accomplish? They obscure more than they teach about a contentious but also critical and still understudied era of development in global Catholic missionary practice and ecclesial oversight and regulation. They seem also to dismiss, and gratuitously to tarnish the memory of, Church leaders of the distant past for the sake of advancing a current agenda for inculturated forms of Christianity across the world’s indigenous cultures—an agenda mapped out in greater detail in the Holy Father’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. There, appearing to be open to the possibility that Roman Catholicism’s ancient, and even central, rituals, creeds, and formal elements are separable from the Gospel or the Word proclaimed by the Church, Francis argues: “It is not essential to impose a specific cultural form, no matter how beautiful or ancient it may be, together with the Gospel. The message that we proclaim always has a certain cultural dress, but we in the Church … sometimes fall into a needless hallowing of our own culture.”

Such concerns may help explain the appeal that Martin Luther, with his stark emphasis on the preached Word and a radically spiritualized, ahistorical view of the Church, holds for Pope Francis. So let us turn to the historical claims of the Holy Father with which we began, about Martin Luther and the causes over time of deep divisions between Lutherans and Catholics. (They are remarks that, coming from a Pope of Rome, I cannot help but think would be eye-popping to the reformer himself.)

With respect to the simple assertion that Martin Luther intended only to renew the Church, not divide her, it is indeed the case that the historical consensus today is that the reformer had no intention of leaving the Catholic Church in 1517, when he first presented his Ninety-Five Theses to religious authorities and a wider public in and around Wittenberg. However, even scholars of the Reformation very mindful of contemporary ecumenical stakes do not deny that, very early during his reforming career, Luther became convinced that the international, visible Church as led by popes, cardinals, and bishops was irredeemably corrupt, “judaizing” in its emphasis on laws and rituals, and therefore inherently at odds with the “true,” invisible Church of all persons of sincere “faith” as he defined it.

In other words, from early on, Luther’s Reformation was centrally about separating, promptly—with the help of powerful territorial princes and city magistrates with local influence and armies at the ready—the hidden, faith-filled wheat from the papistic chaff, so to speak. Luther certainly believed in only one, true, Apostolic Church, but he redefined the Church in a direction that was inherently exclusionary of those who deferred to the papacy, affirmed seven sacraments and Christ’s institution of a consecrated priesthood, and acknowledged an active, participatory role for human free will in God’s economy of salvation. Any concern he might have had to preserve unity in the Church in a way any orthodox Catholic bishop or theologian of the sixteenth century would have recognized as such was, at best, a very secondary priority. Much more urgent for Luther was to rally other reform-minded men and women toward full acceptance of the creed his own conscience told him was the true creed—by 1530, that would have been the enumerated articles of the Augsburg Confession—and, in the process, reject communion with groups that departed in any way from that creed.

Scholars very sympathetic to Luther also acknowledge that he was incorrigibly pugnacious as well as deeply convinced his understanding of faith and of the Church was the only correct one. He sought out opportunities, often, to do battle not only with Catholics (or as he put it in 1545, “whatever riffraff belongs to His Idolatrous and Papal Holiness,” whose tongues “we should … tear out from the back, and nail them on the gallows”), but also with followers of the Swiss reformers Ulrich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, the more radical Anabaptists and Spiritualists, and Protestants closer to his own mind who nevertheless disagreed with him on this or that creedal article. Luther’s verve for creative name-calling and insults where all these groups were concerned was legendary in his own time, as it remains in ours. (Graduate students in Reformation history will confess to finding amusement in a website called the “Lutheran Insulter” in which real ad hominem attacks from the reformer’s writings are generated at random. While writing this paragraph, I clicked on its “Insult me again” button and was informed by Doktor Luther, as if I were Erasmus just daring to defend free will: “You foster in your heart a Lucian, or some other pig from Epicurus’ sty”—this from Luther’s Bondage of the Will of 1525.)

It is also the case that, during a time when some sixteenth-century reformers were actively engaged in the earliest ecumenical efforts to find common ground across the splintering confessions, and to strive toward the reunification of Western Christendom, Luther was relatively uninterested in such things.

Pope Francis, however, in order to push along the cause of Catholic-Lutheran reunification, casts Luther as someone who had no wish to sow discord among Christians. For the hardening sectarian divisions of the early modern era, Francis blames, instead, others who “closed in on [themselves] out of fear or bias with regard to the faith which others profess with a different accent and language.”

With all due respect to His Holiness, this explanation of what unfolded during and after Luther’s time is not only condescending to the full-blooded, spirited, and hardly faultless reformer himself. It is insulting to the intelligence of numerous theologians, apologists, and preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Robert Bellarmine and other Jesuits who devoted years of life, and heart, to clarifying and defending serious, important Catholic doctrines against serious, important Protestant challenges. And it is cavalier toward the memory not only of countless martyrs and war dead on all sides of that era’s terrible struggles, but also of numerous families, villages, even religious communities in Reformation Europe’s confessional borderlands, which were torn apart, agonizingly—while very much speaking the same language, with the same accents!—over very serious, important, real disagreements about doctrine and praxis.

A more humane, respectful attitude toward all parties involved in the Reformation, and toward contemporary ecumenical concerns, was exhibited some years ago in Communio. In an interview of 1984 entitled “Luther and the Unity of the Churches,” a young Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger responded this way—while reflecting on Luther’s legacy—to contemporary ecumenists’ efforts to explain away “as misunderstandings” the discord between Lutherans and Catholics of the distant past:

[This] seems to me like a form of rationalistic arrogance which cannot do any justice to the impassioned struggle of those men as well as the importance of the realities in question. The real issue can only lie in how far we are today able to go beyond the positions of those days and how we can arrive at insights which will overcome the past. To put it differently: unity demands new steps. It cannot be achieved by means of interpretive tricks. … Indifference appears only on the surface to be a unifying link. Now Francis, we know, is not the professorial pope that Benedict has been. Neither is he an historian by training or even by avocation; his focus in school as a young man was chemistry, and later as a Jesuit teacher he focused on literature and psychology. He has had a busy administrative, pastoral, and politically freighted clerical career since that time. So, in fairness, we cannot expect him to speak with exceptional precision on historical themes, even where these touch on present-day ecclesial matters.

But it is not with mere imprecision that Pope Francis delves into the past. He seems to advance headlong, perhaps echoing an opinion or idea he has picked up here or there, in order to praise and blame—to glorify some (Luther the reformer, Ricci the inculturator), and to criticize or repudiate others (Roman centralists, those looking at other religions and faiths as “other”) as less mindful of the Holy Spirit than they ought to have been.

This mode of engaging with the Church’s past does not well serve the Church of the present day, mired as she is in a mass culture domineered by soundbites, 140-character tweets, the shoutings of protesters and populist political rallies, “fake news,” and perhaps most insidious of all, glibness in general. The pope, and all of us who look to the Church’s long experience for insight on how to go forward with present-day challenges, can do better.

I would suggest, where time for deeper engagement with history is not possible—i.e., amidst the busyness of pastoring, preaching, administering, managing, and so on—that churchmen and laity let sink in some words of Blessed John Henry Newman, from the Introduction to his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine:

It is difficult to complete, to finish from history … the living image of Christianity. Confused, inaccurate knowledge is no knowledge. It is the very fault we find with youths under education that they use words without meaning, that they are wanting in precision and distinctness, that they are ignorant of what they know and what they do not know. … Now our difficulty lies in getting beyond this half-knowledge of Christianity, if we make history our teacher; in obtaining from it views serviceable, ready, for belief and practice, whole views, definite answers … measures of its meaning. History is not a creed or a catechism; it gives lessons rather than rules; it does not bring out clearly on the canvass the details which were familiar to the ten thousand minds of whose combined movements it treats. Such is it from its very nature; nor can the defect ever be fully remedied. One counsel I take from this is that we ought to learn better to honor the dead, their legacy, and the history they lived and made, by not trying to exact from them things they cannot give us—whether clear verifications of a particular Christian doctrine, or triumphal cheerleading for this or that item on a papal agenda. And when we discover more fully what gifts they do hold for us, indeed what gifts they themselves are, still, for the Church of the present, we should try harder to resist that ungracious modern instinct to re-fashion them according to our own self-image and liking.

One counsel I take from this is that we ought to learn better to honor the dead, their legacy, and the history they lived and made, by not trying to exact from them things they cannot give us—whether clear verifications of a particular Christian doctrine, or triumphal cheerleading for this or that item on a papal agenda. And when we discover more fully what gifts they do hold for us, indeed what gifts they themselves are, still, for the Church of the present, we should try harder to resist that ungracious modern instinct to re-fashion them according to our own self-image and liking.


TOPICS: Apologetics; Catholic; Religion & Culture; Worship
KEYWORDS: francischurch; francishistory; inculturation
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To: ebb tide
And earlier this fall, the pope praised Luther for having re-focused the Church’s attentions on the centrality of Scripture, blaming subsequent divisions between Catholics and Lutherans not on anything the reformer himself had done, but on those of us who “closed in on ourselves out of fear or bias with regard to the faith which others profess with a different accent and language.”

OMG2!!!


21 posted on 03/27/2017 4:51:14 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: ebb tide
...we ... ought to learn better to honor the dead, their legacy, and the history they lived and made...


Good luck with THIS!!!


As regards the oft-quoted Mt. 16:18, note the following bishops promise in the profession of faith of Vatican 1:

 Basil of Seleucia, Oratio 25:

'You are Christ, Son of the living God.'...Now Christ called this confession a rock, and he named the one who confessed it 'Peter,' perceiving the appellation which was suitable to the author of this confession. For this is the solemn rock of religion, this the basis of salvation, this the wall of faith and the foundation of truth: 'For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus.' To whom be glory and power forever. — Oratio XXV.4, M.P.G., Vol. 85, Col. 296-297.

Bede, Matthaei Evangelium Expositio, 3:

You are Peter and on this rock from which you have taken your name, that is, on myself, I will build my Church, upon that perfection of faith which you confessed I will build my Church by whose society of confession should anyone deviate although in himself he seems to do great things he does not belong to the building of my Church...Metaphorically it is said to him on this rock, that is, the Saviour which you confessed, the Church is to be built, who granted participation to the faithful confessor of his name. — 80Homily 23, M.P.L., Vol. 94, Col. 260. Cited by Karlfried Froehlich, Formen, Footnote #204, p. 156 [unable to verify by me].

Cassiodorus, Psalm 45.5:

'It will not be moved' is said about the Church to which alone that promise has been given: 'You are Peter and upon this rock I shall build my Church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.' For the Church cannot be moved because it is known to have been founded on that most solid rock, namely, Christ the Lord. — Expositions in the Psalms, Volume 1; Volume 51, Psalm 45.5, p. 455

Chrysostom (John) [who affirmed Peter was a rock, but here not the rock in Mt. 16:18]:

Therefore He added this, 'And I say unto thee, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; that is, on the faith of his confession. — Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Homily LIIl; Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110.iii.LII.html)

Cyril of Alexandria:

When [Peter] wisely and blamelessly confessed his faith to Jesus saying, 'You are Christ, Son of the living God,' Jesus said to divine Peter: 'You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church.' Now by the word 'rock', Jesus indicated, I think, the immoveable faith of the disciple.”. — Cyril Commentary on Isaiah 4.2.

Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Book XII): 

“For a rock is every disciple of Christ of whom those drank who drank of the spiritual rock which followed them, 1 Corinthians 10:4 and upon every such rock is built every word of the church, and the polity in accordance with it; for in each of the perfect, who have the combination of words and deeds and thoughts which fill up the blessedness, is the church built by God.'

“For all bear the surname ‘rock’ who are the imitators of Christ, that is, of the spiritual rock which followed those who are being saved, that they may drink from it the spiritual draught. But these bear the surname of rock just as Christ does. But also as members of Christ deriving their surname from Him they are called Christians, and from the rock, Peters.” — Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Book XII), sect. 10,11 ( http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/101612.htm)

Hilary of Potier, On the Trinity (Book II):

Thus our one immovable foundation, our one blissful rock of faith, is the confession from Peter's mouth, Thou art the Son of the living God. On it we can base an answer to every objection with which perverted ingenuity or embittered treachery may assail the truth."-- (Hilary of Potier, On the Trinity (Book II), para 23; Philip Schaff, editor, The Nicene & Post Nicene Fathers Series 2, Vol 9.

22 posted on 03/27/2017 4:54:41 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: livius
BTW, he once said (as Pope) that “theology makes my head ache,” and he has often boasted about his ignorance of it.

That's what he gets from reading FR's Prot spewings!!!

23 posted on 03/27/2017 4:55:56 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: ebb tide
Francis also is fond of misquoting the Bible or taking verses out of context to his own liking.

I just HATE it when stuff like this happens!!


The way it's written:
 
Galatians 4:4-5
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.
 
The way Rome teaches it:
 
Galatians 4:4-5
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a....
 
Co-Redemptrix, 
Ark of the Covenant,
Cause of Our Joy,
Cause of our Salvation ,
Comfort of the Afflicted,
Destroyer of Heresy,
Ever-virgin ,
Favoured Daughter of the Father,
Gate of Heaven,
God-bearer,
Health of the Sick,
Help of Christians,
Holy Mary,
Holy Mother of God,
Holy Virgin of Virgins,
House of Gold,
Joy of the Just,
Majesty,
Mirror of Justice,
Morning Star,
Most Holy,
Mother Admirable,
Mother Inviolate,
Mother Most Amiable,
Mother Most Chaste,
Mother Most Pure,
Mother of Christ,
Mother of Divine Grace,
Mother of God,
Mother of Good Counsel,
Mother of Mercy,
Mother of Orphans,
Mother of Our Creator,
Mother of Our Redeemer,
Mother of Sorrows,
Mother of the Church,
Mother of the Poor,
Mother of the Word,
Mother Thrice Admirable,
Mother Undefiled,
Mystical Rose,
Nova Eva (the New Eve),
Our Lady of Compassion,
Our Lady of Confidence,
Our Lady of Victory,
Our Lady, Star of the Sea,
Our Mother of Perpetual Help,
Queen Assumed Into Heaven,
Queen Conceived Without Original Sin,
Queen of All Saints,
Queen of Angels,
Queen of Apostles,
Queen of Confessors,
Queen of Families,
Queen of Heaven,
Queen of Martyrs,
Queen of Patriarchs,
Queen of Peace,
Queen of Prophets,
Queen of the Most Holy Rosary,
Queen of Virgins,
Ravisher of Hearts,
Refuge of Sinners,
Seat of Wisdom,
She Who Shows the Way,
Singular Vessel of Devotion,
Spiritual Vessel,
Spouse of the Holy Spirit,
Tabernacle of the Lord,
Temple of the Most Holy Trinity,
Throne of Wisdom,
Tower of David,
Tower of Ivory,
Treasure House of God's Graces,
Untier of Knots,
Vessel of Honor,
Virgin God-bearer,
Virgin Most Faithful,
Virgin Most Merciful,
Virgin Most Powerful,
Virgin Most Prudent,
Virgin Most Renowned,
Virgin Most Venerable          born under the law, to HELP redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship; sooner or later; and not spend TOO much time in Purgatory.
 


24 posted on 03/27/2017 4:57:56 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Slyfox; redleghunter; Springfield Reformer; kinsman redeemer; BlueDragon; metmom; boatbums; ...
He said that encyclicals have always been vetted and sent to experts for their consideration and edited so that it is a solid piece before it is published and disseminated. But that has not happened in the last four years. And Francis wonders why there is questioning of his writing and why there is a dubia hanging out there like a huge matzo ball.

Yet according to official (subject to what "official" means) RC teaching, assent to encyclicals is required, and in general to non-infallible papal teaching addressed to the church. Which is both the strength (if unity at any cost is the goal) and the weakness of the RC basis for assurance of Truth and obedience to it.

For rather than the validity of what is taught being subject to by examination in the light of the authoritative basis for it, which Caths criticize evangelicals for doing, while dissident "true RCs do the same (the difference being the supreme deterministic authoritative basis for evangelicals is wholly inspired Scripture), much historical papal teaching is that "the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors ." - VEHEMENTER NOS, an Encyclical of Pope Pius X promulgated on February 11, 1906.

25 posted on 03/27/2017 4:57:58 AM PDT by daniel1212 ( Turn to the Lord Jesus as a damned and destitute sinner+ trust Him to save you, then follow Him!)
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To: ebb tide

He wrestled with the devil, and the devil won.

He shouldn’t’a been jist fiddlin’ around!!

https://youtu.be/tnepPZChA5U?t=23


26 posted on 03/27/2017 5:02:30 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: ebb tide
If I ever meet Luther, I'll know I'm in Hell.

You; my son; can AVOID this ghastly prospect!!!


For a low; LOW! price of ONLY $11.95...
 
 
 
 
 
http://www.catholiccompany.com/brown-scapular-brown-cord-18-inch-i104714/?sku=2026726&utm_source=google&utm_medium=products&aid=4280&product_id=2026726&creative=11070181829&device=c&matchtype=e
 
 

27 posted on 03/27/2017 5:06:55 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: ebb tide
You; my son; can AVOID this ghastly prospect!!!


Mel Gibson SWEARS by his!!



28 posted on 03/27/2017 5:08:57 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Elsie
Don't just rely on your BS; but also pickup THIS book today!!!



29 posted on 03/27/2017 5:15:34 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Elsie
... THIS book ...

???

I thought Mary was JEWISH??

30 posted on 03/27/2017 5:17:29 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: ebb tide; boatbums
The heretic, Luther, was baptized a Catholic, raised as a Catholic and ordained as as Catholic priest. He wrestled with the devil, and the devil won. Luther apostatized from the One, True, Faith.

Rather, it is the RC distinctives of this so-called One, True, Faith that are unseen in the NT church of Scripture , and contrary to it.

Moreover, your page on Luther is typical of the hit pages on Luther, which either employ bogus or questionable (such as "Table Talk" recollections) quotes or uses them out of context, and have no interest in understanding Luther's polemical style, which is often hyperbolic.

The main first reference in your referenced compilation is the misnamed, "The Facts About Luther," by dubious Roman Catholic author Msgr. Patrick O'Hare. Of which Researcher Jame's Swan, whose site is where you should search for such things, finds , "This old book had sunk into obscurity until it was revived by the Roman Catholic publisher Tan Books in 1987. In their zeal, some of Rome's 1990's early e-pologists put O'Hare's content on the Internet without checking his facts about Luther."

The next reference is Hartmann Grisar, "a Jesuit historian who used Freudian psychology to assess Luther as a pathological manic-depressive personality. Though as Swan goes on to state , "in my own use of Grisar, I have found him to be mostly reliable with his citations."

I have not determined if the hyperbolic quotes here are accurate, but the Mass is much an corruption of what we see in the NT church.

Your source goes on to reference De Wette for “We must remove the Decalogue out of sight and heart.” Swan's in his research finds:

This letter is not available in the English edition of Luther's Works. It has though been cited either in full or partially in a number of books. The letter itself has quite a polemical history, cited by numerous Roman Catholic sources, as well as even being cited by PBS.

And which is from a letter to a person who is afflicted, and from which is the quote taken out of context, which is that of battling with the devil when the accuser of the brethren is doing so. In response Luther even says "In a case like this the devil is overcome by scorning and despising him, not by opposing him and arguing with him." And in his typical hyperbolic language he even says he wishes he could commit "some brave sin" in order to illustrate the redemption one can have in Christ. And it is and in the context of counseling what to say to the devil when he charges you with sin based on the Law, that Luther says in response that we are to not look to the Law which condemns us, but to the Christ which redeems us:

We must put the whole law entirely out of our eyes and hearts,--we, I say, whom the devil thus assails and torments. Whenever the devil charges us with our sins and pronounces us guilty of death and hell, we ought to say to him: I admit that I deserve death and hell; what, then, will happen to me? Why, you will be eternally damned! By no means; for I know One who has suffered and made satisfaction for me. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where He abides, there will I also abide." http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2016/02/luther-when-devil-comes-to-tempt-and.html

I am not defending all that Luther says, and he says many things that make us blush or reprove, including being too Catholic, but the Internet abounds with inaccurate or bogus assertions, and that Luther actually was an antinomianis one.

For as already recently shown you in response to another one of your postings of RC propaganda,

In his Introduction to Romans, Luther stated that saving faith is,

a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever...Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire! [http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/luther-faith.txt]

This is what I have often said, if faith be true, it will break forth and bear fruit. If the tree is green and good, it will not cease to blossom forth in leaves and fruit. It does this by nature. I need not first command it and say: Look here, tree, bear apples. For if the tree is there and is good, the fruit will follow unbidden. If faith is present works must follow.” [Sermons of Martin Luther 2.2:340-341]

“We must therefore most certainly maintain that where there is no faith there also can be no good works; and conversely, that there is no faith where there are no good works. Therefore faith and good works should be so closely joined together that the essence of the entire Christian life consists in both.” [Martin Luther, as cited by Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963], 246, footnote 99]

All believers are like poor Lazarus; and every believer is a true Lazarus, for he is of the same faith, mind and will, as Lazarus. And whoever will not be a Lazarus, will surely have his portion with the rich glutton in the flames of hell. For we all must like Lazarus trust in God, surrender ourselves to him to work in us according to his own good pleasure, and be ready to serve all men.. And although we all do not suffer from such sores and poverty, yet the same mind and will must be in us, that were in Lazarus, cheerfully to bear such things, wherever God wills it.” [Sermons of Martin Luther 2.2:25]

“This is why St. Luke and St. James have so much to say about works, so that one says: Yes, I will now believe, and then he goes and fabricates for himself a fictitious delusion, which hovers only on the lips as the foam on the water. No, no; faith is a living and an essential thing, which makes a new creature of man, changes his spirit and wholly and completely converts him. It goes to the foundation and there accomplishes a renewal of the entire man; so, if I have previously seen a sinner, I now see in his changed conduct, manner and life, that he believes. So high and great a thing is faith.”[Sermons of Martin Luther 2.2:341]

“For it is impossible for him who believes in Christ, as a just Savior, not to love and to do good. If, however, he does not do good nor love, it is sure that faith is not present. Therefore man knows by the fruits what kind of a tree it is, and it is proved by love and deed whether Christ is in him and he believes in Christ...” [Sermons of Martin Luther 1:40]

“For if your heart is in the state of faith that you know your God has revealed himself to you to be so good and merciful, without thy merit, and purely gratuitously, while you were still his enemy and a child of eternal wrath; if you believe this, you cannot refrain from showing yourself so to your neighbor; and do all out of love to God and for the welfare of your neighbor. Therefore, see to it that you make no distinction between friend and foe, the worthy and the unworthy; for you see that all who were here mentioned, have merited from us something different than that we should love and do them good. And the Lord also teaches this, when in Luke 6:35 he says: "But love your enemies, and do good unto them, and lend, never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High: for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil." [Sermons of Martin Luther 2.2:101]

...if obedience and God’s commandments do not dominate you, then the work is not right, but damnable, surely the devil’s own doings, although it were even so great a work as to raise the dead......Peter says the grace and gifts of God are not one but manifold, and each is to tend to his own, develop the same and through them be of service to others.” [Sermons of Martin Luther 1:244]

In addition, upon hearing that he was being charged with rejection of the Old Testament moral law, Luther responded,

And truly, I wonder exceedingly, how it came to be imputed to me, that I should reject the Law or ten Commandments, there being extant so many of my own expositions (and those of several sorts) upon the Commandments, which also are daily expounded, and used in our Churches, to say nothing of the Confession and Apology, and other books of ours. Martin Luther, ["A Treatise against Antinomians, written in an Epistolary way", http://www.truecovenanter.com/truelutheran/luther_against_the_antinomians.html]

31 posted on 03/27/2017 6:53:05 AM PDT by daniel1212 ( Turn to the Lord Jesus as a damned and destitute sinner+ trust Him to save you, then follow Him!)
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To: daniel1212
Francis did not write the Amoris with the teaching authority of the Church, the Magisterium, therefore it is his own opinion and not worthy of assent by the people.

All encyclicals, before this pope, were written so that he could say "We teach," very much like Peter himself speaking for all the Apostles. Francis did not include the teaching authority in Amoris. He had his people send out questionnaires and he conferred with a few like-minded bishops. That is contrary to how the Magisterium works.

An encyclical is meant to present to the Catholic Church the teaching of all the bishops. In this one he picked a few friends and is trying to pawn it off as "The Official Teaching of the Roman Catholic Church."

Many people know better than that and that is why he is getting the blowback and deservedly so.

32 posted on 03/27/2017 7:50:57 AM PDT by Slyfox (Where's Reagan when we need him? Look in the mirror - the spirit of The Gipper lives within you.)
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To: Slyfox
Francis did not write the Amoris with the teaching authority of the Church, the Magisterium, therefore it is his own opinion and not worthy of assent by the people.

I was referring to what are formally titled an encyclicals, while Amoris Laetitia is formally titled and usually referred to as a "Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation," such as as by your bishops. Granted, the difference is imprecise, since an encyclical originally referred to a circular letter passed around to all the churches of a certain area, but came to " almost exclusively refer to certain papal documents which differ in their technical form from the ordinary style of either Bulls or Briefs." (Catholic Encyclopedia > Encyclical)

Which differences are technical (http://www.ewtn.com/HolySee/Pontiff/categories.asp#exhortation), and what magisterial level a teaching falls under, and thus which level of assent is required of Catholics, are typically matters of dispute.

All encyclicals, before this pope, were written so that he could say "We teach," very much like Peter himself speaking for all the Apostles. Francis did not include the teaching authority in Amoris. He had his people send out questionnaires and he conferred with a few like-minded bishops. That is contrary to how the Magisterium works.

An encyclical is meant to present to the Catholic Church the teaching of all the bishops. In this one he picked a few friends and is trying to pawn it off as "The Official Teaching of the Roman Catholic Church."

Then perhaps the term "Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation," distinguishes it from an encyclical, yet it is obvious that you reject this document as being worthy of the title "Apostolic Exhortation" as well, while your bishops overall applaud it as in affirming,

Pope Francis has given us a tremendous gift in Amoris Laetitia. May our ongoing reception of it continue to be an opportunity for the whole Church and society to renew their dedication to protect, promote, and strengthen marriages and families. - http://www.usccb.org/news/2016/16-127.cfm

Francis does use "we" in this letter, and while may be not be "speaking for all the Apostles" (nor did so many other popes, inclusively) but it seems like he is speaking for a majority, which is what elected him. And papal authority reserves to itself the supreme authority to provide the correct understanding or church teaching, as do the bishops with the pope, as V2 exampled (perhaps you publicly dissent in part from that as well).

And i think that your criteria upon which you justify your public dissent is subject to dispute, with both sides being able to invoke past teaching to support them.

Francis did not write the Amoris with the teaching authority of the Church, the Magisterium, therefore it is his own opinion and not worthy of assent by the people.

While Pope Francis did say "that everything in his post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia was agreed by a majority of the Synod fathers," (http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2016/12/07/pope-francis-everything-in-amoris-laetitia-was-supported-by-the-synod), yet rather than the pope being unable to exercise the magisterial teaching authority of the Church apart from the bishops, it is the bishops, singly or collectively, who have no authority apart from papal sanction, and who "can himself, independent of the bishops, exercise the supreme Magisterium." - Ralph M. McInerny. What went wrong with VATICAN II. (Sophia Institute Press, 1998; https://www.ewtn.com/library/theology/sipvat2.htm).

I know the SSPV and SSPX type have their side to justify them essentially acting like us in dissenting from what is taught by Rome based upon our understanding of our respective supreme authorative sources (and i even think they are correct that modern RC teaching contradicts some of her past, though both stand in contrast with the NT church ) but i do not see room for their dissent in the light of much past teaching.

Epistola Tua: To the shepherds alone was given all power to teach, to judge, to direct; on the faithful was imposed the duty of following their teaching, of submitting with docility to their judgment , and of allowing themselves to be governed, corrected, and guided by them in the way of salvation.

Thus, it is an absolute necessity for the simple faithful to submit in mind and heart to their own pastors, and for the latter to submit with them to the Head and Supreme Pastor.... Similarly, it is to give proof of a submission which is far from sincere to set up some kind of opposition between one Pontiff and another. Those who, faced with two differing directives, reject the present one to hold to the past, are not giving proof of obedience to the authority which has the right and duty to guide them; and in some ways they resemble those who, on receiving a condemnation, would wish to appeal to a future council, or to a Pope who is better informed.

On this point what must be remembered is that in the government of the Church, except for the essential duties imposed on all Pontiffs by their apostolic office, each of them can adopt the attitude which he judges best according to times and circumstances. Of this he alone is the judge. It is true that for this he has not only special lights, but still more the knowledge of the needs and conditions of the whole of Christendom, for which, it is fitting, his apostolic care must provide. - Epistola Tua (1885), Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII; http://www.ewtn.com/vexperts/showmessage_print.asp?number=403215&language=en

"It follows that the Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of per sons, the Pastors and the flock...the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors ." - VEHEMENTER NOS, an Encyclical of Pope Pius X promulgated on February 11, 1906.

Nor can we pass over in silence the audacity of those who, not enduring sound doctrine, contend that "without sin and without any sacrifice of the Catholic profession assent and obedience may be refused to those judgments and decrees of the Apostolic See, whose object is declared to concern the Church's general good and her rights and discipline, so only it does not touch the dogmata of faith and morals. " But no one can be found not clearly and distinctly to see and understand how grievously this is opposed to the Catholic dogma of the full power given from God by Christ our Lord Himself to the Roman Pontiff of feeding, ruling and guiding the Universal Church. (Quanta Cura. Encyclical of Pope Pius IX promulgated on December 8, 1864; http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9quanta.htm)

20. Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent... if the Supreme Pontiffs in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, it is obvious that that matter, according to the mind and will of the Pontiffs, cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians. - PIUS XII, HUMANI GENERI, August 1950; http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html

The authority (of papal encyclicals) is undoubtedly great". It is, in a sense, sovereign. It is the teaching of the supreme pastor and teacher of the Church. Hence the faithful have a strict obligation to receive this teaching with an infinite respect. A man must not be content simply not to contradict it openly and in a more or less scandalous fashion. An internal mental assent is demanded. It should be received as the teaching sovereignly authorized within the Church." - Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, esteemed Catholic theologian and professor of fundamental dogmatic theology at the Catholic University of America, who served as a peritus for Cardinal Ottaviani at the Second Vatican Council. Extract from the American Ecclesiastical Review, Vol. CXXI, August, 1949; http://www.catholicapologetics.info/thechurch/encyclicals/docauthority.htm

For it is quite foreign to everyone bearing the name of a Christian to trust his own mental powers with such pride as to agree only with those things which he can examine from their inner nature, and to imagine that the Church, sent by God to teach and guide all nations, is not conversant with present affairs and circumstances; or even that they must obey only in those matters which she has decreed by solemn definition as though her other decisions might be presumed to be false or putting forward insufficient motive for truth and honesty.

Quite to the contrary, a characteristic of all true followers of Christ, lettered or unlettered, is to suffer themselves to be guided and led in all things that touch upon faith or morals by the Holy Church of God through its Supreme Pastor the Roman Pontiff, who is himself guided by Jesus Christ Our Lord. - CASTI CONNUBII, ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XI; https://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html

...when we love the Pope, there are no discussions regarding what he orders or demands, or up to what point obedience must go, and in what things he is to be obeyed ; when we love the Pope, we do not say that he has not spoken clearly enough, almost as if he were forced to repeat to the ear of each one the will clearly expressed so many times not only in person, but with letters and other public documents ; we do not place his orders in doubt, adding the facile pretext of those unwilling to obey – that it is not the Pope who commands, but those who surround him; we do not limit the field in which he might and must exercise his authority ; we do not set above the authority of the Pope that of other persons, however learned, who dissent from the Pope, who, even though learned, are not holy, because whoever is holy cannot dissent from the Pope.

The Bishops form the most sacred part of the Church, that which instructs and governs men by divine right; and so he who resists them and stubbornly refuses to obey their word places himself outside the Church [cf. Matt. 18:18]. But obedience must not limit itself to matters which touch the faith: its sphere is much more vast: it extends to all matters which the episcopal power embraces. - (Pope Saint Pius X, Allocution Vi ringrazio to priests on the 50th anniversary of the Apostolic Union, November 18, 1912, as found at http://www.christorchaos.com/?q=content/choosing-ignore-pope-leo-xiii-and-pope-saint-pius-x

to scrutinize the actions of a bishop, to criticize them, does not belong to individual Catholics, but concerns only those who, in the sacred hierarchy, have a superior power; above all, it concerns the Supreme Pontiff, for it is to him that Christ confided the care of feeding not only all the lambs, but even the sheep [cf. John 21:17]. - Est Sane Molestum (1888) Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII; http://www.novusordowatch.org/est-sane-molestum-leo-xiii.htm

In addition, as concerns social teaching, The "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church" (2005) states:

80. In the Church’s social doctrine the Magisterium is at work in all its various components and expressions. … Insofar as it is part of the Church’s moral teaching, the Church’s social doctrine has the same dignity and authority as her moral teaching. It is authentic Magisterium, which obligates the faithful to adhere to it . - http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html

And it is quite well evidenced that the popes last (titled) encyclical (http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html) is intended to teach what the Church's moral teaching demands as regards ecology and economy. (172 references in this encyclical cite church teaching and prelates for support).

Thus we either have Trad. RCs contradicting past papal teaching in asserting the modern papal and magisterial teaching contradicts the past, or Rome's interpretation of herself is to be trusted.

33 posted on 03/27/2017 11:34:46 AM PDT by daniel1212 ( Turn to the Lord Jesus as a damned and destitute sinner+ trust Him to save you, then follow Him!)
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To: boatbums

Thank you for the well researched information, which will, unfortunately, be dismissed off hand by those who need the truth the most.


34 posted on 03/27/2017 1:42:12 PM PDT by metmom ( ...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith...)
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To: daniel1212; Slyfox
Francis did not write the Amoris with the teaching authority of the Church, the Magisterium, therefore it is his own opinion and not worthy of assent by the people.

And yet, utterings from a supposed 'Mary' are taken to heart by ALL Catholics!!!

Go figger!!

35 posted on 03/27/2017 2:25:38 PM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: daniel1212

Isn’t it a little strange that for some RCs the LEADER - the SUPREME PONTIFF - of the Roman Catholic church cannot teach with any “authority”???


36 posted on 03/27/2017 6:44:42 PM PDT by boatbums (God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.)
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