Posted on 11/17/2017 3:03:09 PM PST by ebb tide
As an outsider, I can’t help but wonder whether the pope and the USCCB were particularly provoked by Weinandy’s suggestion that Jesus had allowed this controversy in order “to manifest just how weak is the faith of many within the Church, even among too many of her bishops.” Catholics will have to make up their own minds—but I’ll admit I have questions about the faith of Pope Francis, which seems, if not weak, at least different from that of the Catholic tradition.
Even before the release of Amoris Laetitia in March 2016, Francis had caused many to question his fidelity to that tradition. In 2014, the midterm report of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family recommended that pastors emphasize the “positive aspects” of cohabitation and civil remarriage after divorce. He said that Jesus’s multiplication of bread and fish was really a miracle of sharing, not of multiplying (2013); told a woman in an invalid marriage that she could take Holy Communion (2014); claimed that lost souls do not go to hell (2015); and said that Jesus had begged his parents for forgiveness (2015). In 2016, he said that God had been “unjust with his son,” announced his prayer intention to build a society “that places the human person at the center,” and declared that inequality is “the greatest evil that exists.” In 2017, he joked that “inside the Holy Trinity they’re all arguing behind closed doors, but on the outside they give the picture of unity.” Jesus Christ, he said, “made himself the devil.” “No war is just,” he pronounced. At the end of history, “everything will be saved. Everything.”
Weinandy and other Catholic critics have pointed to alarming statements and suggestions in Amoris Laetitia itself. The exhortation declares, “No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!” In December 2016, the Catholic philosophers John Finnis and Germain Grisez argued in their “Misuse of Amoris Laetitia” that though this statement reflects a trend among Catholic thinkers stemming from Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, it contradicts the gospels’ clear statements and the Catholic tradition’s teaching that there is “unending punishment” in hell. Finnis and Grisez charge that, according to the logic of Amoris Laetitia, some of the faithful are too weak to keep God’s commandments, and can live in grace while committing ongoing and habitual sins “in grave matter.” Like (Episcopalian) Joseph Fletcher, who taught Situation Ethics in the 1960s, the exhortation suggests that there are exceptions to every moral rule and that there is no such thing as an intrinsically evil act.
I take no pleasure in Rome’s travails. For decades, orthodox Anglicans and other Protestants seeking to resist the apostasies of liberal Christianity have looked to Rome for moral and theological support. Most of us recognized that we were really fighting the sexual revolution, which had coopted and corrupted the Episcopal Church and its parent across the pond. First it was the sanctity of life and euthanasia. Then it was homosexual practice. Now it is gay marriage and transgender ideology. During the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, we non-Catholics arguing moral theology could point to learned and compelling arguments coming out of Rome and say, in effect, “The oldest and largest part of the Body of Christ agrees with us, and it does so with remarkable sophistication.”
Those of us who continue to fight for orthodoxy, in dogmatic as well as moral theology, miss those days when there was a clear beacon shining from across the Tiber. For now, it seems, Rome itself has been infiltrated by the sexual revolution. The center is not holding.
Though we are dismayed, we must not despair. For the brave and principled stand made by Tom Weinandy reminds us that God raises up prophetic lights when dark days come to his Church.
Gerald McDermott holds the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School.
Your current pope has spent a lifetime in studying theology.....Romam Catholic theology. Care to explain how he’s gone off the rails?
Have you studied at a seminary? Do you have any qualifications from an accredited seminary?
That's some organization ya'll are running.
“I would not believe in the Gospel myself if the authority of the Catholic Church did not influence me to do so.” St. Augustine
Against the letter of Mani, 5,6, 397 A.D.
There you have it from one of the greatest ever theologians (perhaps second only to St. Aquinas) whose books are studied in leading seminaries, universities, and theology faculties around the world.
So again....what are your qualifications in theology?
Will? Yes.
Free? No.
Your church has taught you wrong.
Romans 6:15-23 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
yeah...that's some theologian.
Guess you're not a believer in a six day creation either.
His opinion. Nothing more.
Intellectual prowess means nothing without the enlightening of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual truths cannot be understood by the natural man. They are spiritually discerned and that does not happen without the enlightening of the Holy Spirit.
Someone can know all there is to know about God and not know Him;.
Sure, cause we all know that science is written in stone.
The metaphorical approach adopted by Roman Catholicism as a result of Augustine has lead to many, many errors in Roman Catholicism. Many of these pertain to yes....you guessed it: Mary.
Infallibility is not a power of popes; it is a protection from popes. It protects, not popes, but the Church.
Surely we all know that Christ gave promises of protection to the Church?
Two minutes: view and laugh.
Not so fast fish...
Not in Scripture... anywhere.
not in Scripture... anywhere.
not in Scripture... anywhere.
not in Scripture... anywhere.
Not in Scripture... anywhere.
"But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. John 16:13 NASB
Perhaps this is what is wrong with Roman Catholicism...they're relying upon man verses the Spirit.
What are those qualifications again, Steelfish?
Doesn't matter. This is never in Scripture... anywhere.
Homosexuality is rampant & allowed is Vatican City.
Yet there are only two, possibly four, examples of popes speaking "ex cathedra".
That leaves an awful lot of writings by the popes over the years that could be viewed as mere commentaries.
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