Catholic Ping - Come home for Easter and experience God’s merciful love. Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Nice piece for NCR.
Oh, and if it's okay with everyone I'm just going to copy and paste the inevitable Catholic-bashing posts so we can just get them out of the way.
In the humble opinion of this Catholic, Pope John Paul II has been a disaster to the Catholic Church. During his 25-year plus reign, the Church has deteriorated in the West as the pope has either tolerated or turned a blind-eye to modernists and other heretics within the Church.
This is why things like Mass attendence is off and vocations in America are but a fraction of what they were before JPII's Vatican II "reforms."
JPII is popularly thought of as a traditionalist and conservative. This is not so. The pope can only be viewed as such in that he has not totally compitulated to the modern world by approving homosexuality, women priests, equality of all religions, etc.
I wish the Pope well but fear that the one replacing him will be even worse.
Great quote!
One of the positive fruits of this papacy has been the return of most of the Pope's great encyclicals to a firm basis in the Bible.
This has always been the case in Catholicism, but it has not always been so directly apparent.
The strength of this article is that it, too, keeps returning to the underlying biblical texts.
"The Holy Father’s reflections help us understand both the importance of this moment of his papacy and our own aging and ailments. He manifests the truth of the Psalmist’s words: "The just will flourish like the palm-tree, and grow like a Lebanon cedar, ... still bearing fruit when they are old, still full of sap, still green, to proclaim that the Lord is just" (Psalm 92)."
He now bestows upon us his final and greatest gift as he demonstrates to us how to face with grace and dignity our mortal end. This man is truly of the Spirit.