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Posted on 04/08/2016 6:53:23 AM PDT by Lera
In a major shift of Catholic tenets of faith, pope releases paper instructing Catholics on how to live, tells them to accept homosexuals
Pope Francis, who has long revealed his liberal positions through interviews, came out on Friday in an official statement calling on Catholics to be more accepting of homosexuals as well as divorced Catholics.
While he didn't change official church doctrines in his paper, which is an "apostolic exhortation" instructing Catholics on how to live, the pope paved the way for a serious shift in the Catholic church away from central tenets of the faith.
"A pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws...as if they were stones to throw at people's lives," he wrote in the paper, cited by CNN. "By thinking that everything is black and white, we sometimes close off the way of grace and growth."
"I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion. But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a Church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness," he added.
"Every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration."
Pope Francis' statements appear in his paper "On Love in the Family," entitled "Amoris Laetitia" in Latin. It spans over 260 pages, and is based on two conferences of the world's Catholic bishops known as synods, which were called by the pope.
(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
Did anyone ever tell you you have a way with words?
I received it!
XOXOXO
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Instead of the historical level of under 5 percent out-of-wedlock births, guaranteeing a strong foundation of family life to undergird each new generation, we’d rocketed to an unprecedented rate of over 50 percent, the first Bastard Nation in modern history. Some 90 percent of the men incarcerated in prison were raised by fractured family fragments, and often didn’t know their own fathers. We shrugged these facts off as insignificant byproducts of modernity, and partied on.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3058882/posts
Natural laws learned over thousands of years were mocked, ridiculed, overturned, and even outlawed. Toward the end, homosexual drill sergeants prowled the barracks grooming receptive teenage recruits. Hey, we were told, it’s their business, and who are you to judge them? Later, they could get married in the post-interfaith worship center by a military spiritual advisor (“chapels” and “chaplains” having been purged from the lexicon for favoring the Christian faiths) and then move on to adopting children.
And finally, the last old-guard bunker to fall: the Boy Scouts, completing the cycle of government-approved sodomite corruption. For a century the Scouts were morally straight? According to whose definition of straight? So why shouldn’t adult homosexual Scout leaders share tents with teenagers in our brave new world? Don’t be a homophobe, we were told. Each child can make his or her own free choice about their gender identity, but now with helpful adult mentors to guide them along the formerly forbidden paths.
If it feels good, do it. Or have it done to you. Or even do it unto the little children. Tommy wants to become Tomasina before heading to kindergarten? Her brave new mommy agrees? A government-provided surgeon will perform the “gender reassignment” operation. And if kindergarten isn’t soon enough to put the kids on the unrepressed road to gender identification, then start them on Heather Has Two Mommies and Prince and Prince cartoon books in the government-subsidized day care centers.
Smiling experts assured us that we were merely throwing off the shackles of our repressed sexualities. Dissent is hate, and hate is not tolerated around here, mister, so shut up and get with the program. Well, I couldn’t get with the program, so I quit my public high school job. As a world history teacher, moving from a public school to a Christian academy (at less pay and fewer benefits) gave me a couple more years of insulation from the social wreckage cascading down.
I kept looking up for the big asteroid, but we didn’t need God to smite us from outer space. In the end, we smote ourselves with our hubris, believing that we were replacing God’s wisdom with our own. The proud decadence and in-your-face cultural perversions didn’t cause the Rupture, but they were surely flashing red signs warning that the end was near.
It must be the history teacher in me who always seeks historical precedents and comparisons. The former USSR, with the full power of a mass-murdering totalitarian state behind it, attempted for seventy-five years to create a new society of atheist but socially altruistic New Soviet Men—and failed utterly to achieve it. The Soviets considered this a goal worth slaughtering tens of millions of their countrymen, and they still couldn’t achieve it. Not even across four generations and with an entire archipelago of Gulag slave labor camps.
But not even the mass-murdering Soviet rulers were foolish enough to attempt to outlaw sexual differences and mandate a New Genderless Person in the name of perfect political correctness. What sane person in the United States could possibly have thought that our own vastly more ambitious experiment in social re-engineering would turn out any better than the simpler economic revolution attempted by the USSR?
Our modern human folly is so easy to understand in retrospect. A gullible generation or two can be brainwashed into believing that up is down, that there is no absolute wrong or right, and that the old natural laws can be abolished according to the social and political fashions of the age.
But of course even widely held false beliefs are not the same as the truth. The belief that the law of gravity has been repealed as being unfair to the heavy can easily be tested with a single step away from a cliff. The enduring truths of other supposedly outdated natural laws took longer to test, but in the end the proofs were just as conclusive, and just as fatal, but on a much vaster scale.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3058882/posts
It is almost impossible to find any traditionalist (or even remotely traditionalist) Catholic web site that doesn't blame "qabbalah" or a "Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy" for everything under the sun (I am not discounting a Masonic conspiracy, but the idea that it is run by Jews). I have just recently seen the current bathroom issue blamed on "Freudian-Jewish" concepts and on "qabbalah," on the theory that in "apostate" Judaism everything is about sex.
I used to admire Sungenis because he was a creationist (and a geocentrist). Unfortunately, he chose to become an anti-Jewish loon. He is absolutely unhinged on the Jews and reflexively accuses all his critics of having Jewish ancestors.
Let me explain somewhat of why I am such a "fanatic" on this issue.
As you probably know, I actually joined the Catholic Church a little over thirty years ago. However much I, as a Fundamentalist Protestant, had been prejudiced against Catholicism, I respected it and regarded it as an important and perhaps the most respectable voice left on this earth for belief in the supernatural. To say that I was bitterly disappointed would be an understatement. Not only had the Catholic Church abandoned the field entirely (so far as Biblical inerrancy and Genesis 1-11, Esther, Daniel, and Jonah were concerned), but it actually used its respectability and intellectual tradition to ridicule people such as myself who still believed these things--and let me reiterate to you that in my case I was representative of an entire culture that believes these things.
I was tolerated much as an unfortunate with a mental disability would be tolerated, but every Catholic publication, book (including Catholic bibles with imprimata), and tract (not to mention every priest) I came into contact with identified both evolution and higher Biblical criticism as important Catholic distinctives, just as Mary and the Papacy are Catholic distinctives. This is the same today online where non-traditionalist Catholic web sites (very much including the OSV and Catholic Answers families) continue to propagate this same attitude. You may even go to Catholic discussion forums where any questioning of evolution is met by shrieks that "we aren't Protestants!"
As far as I am concerned, the Catholic Church did not want me and did not (and does not) want anyone from my culture (I've even read that G-d allowed the Protestant churches to develop specifically for people who weren't "smart" enough to handle the "truth"). The Catholic Church could have been a powerful force for good in the modern world. It has not been for decades, perhaps not for over a century. It chooses to use all its cachet to attack the Bible and people who believe the Bible is entirely true, even to the point of the current Pope whose apologia for evolution is that "G-d is not a magician." Yet these same hypocrites have not the slightest problem with the magic tricks recorded in the "new testament" or medieval legends. They cannot, therefore, logically reject Genesis 1-11 because of science, because otherwise they would have to reject all miracles. They reject Genesis 1-11 specifically because they don't like the people who believe that portion of the Bible and want to put just as much daylight between themselves and people like me as possible.
Even here on this forum I have observed in the almost seventeen years I've been here your co-religionists posting article after article after article attacking the total veracity of the Bible and doing so because to this is to be guilty of sola scriptura (which both you and I know to be garbage, since total inerrancy is a completely different issue from sola scriptura). They loudly identify this irreverence as a Catholic distinctive and pour ridicule on the "Protestants" who don't share it, touting the Catholic intellectual tradition as evidence.
Please forgive me if my anger turns seething hot at such behavior.
I have on numerous occasions begged the more conservative Catholics on this forum to get involved in this issue and to publicly rebuke their fellows who insist that evolution and an errant Bible are Catholic dogmas. For the most part I have been totally unsuccessful. I have even read claims that these Catholics have never read any post by any Catholic here taking these positions, which I find very hard to believe. Yet despite the fact that these alleged creationist Catholics must disagree profoundly on these issues I have seen nothing but solidarity among all Catholics on all sides of these issues. Please forgive me, but I do not understand this. I don't know how anyone who believes in a totally inerrant Bible or who upholds all Biblical narratives of supernatural events consistently can still proudly identify with the Catholic Church or with evolutionist/higher critical Catholics. I'm sorry, but this is just not a "minor" issue to me, nor is it to anyone else of my culture and background.
I appreciate your own position and support, but I could never again identify with the Catholic Church even if I wanted to (which I will never do again). There was no need to turn on the poorest and most ridiculed segment of chrstendom in order to win brownie points with atheists who don't believe in the virgin birth or transubstantiation either, but who for some reason find those concepts less objectionable than the idea that the coming into existence of everything from nothing was not a purely natural phenomenon. Aquinas and the entire Catholic intellectual and philosophical tradition have been used to bludgeon the people of rural America instead of defending doctrines once held and now abandoned (even the church fathers are no longer considered authoritative on this issue because they were "men of their time"--though I notice they remain authoritative on every issue which Fundamentalist Protestants have trouble understanding).
I am sorry that I am not always a gentleman, but any time I read a Catholic/Orthodox apologia or evolution/higher criticism or attack on simple belief in the inerrancy of an allegedly common bible, I am going to continue to lose my temper for the foreseeable future.
Thank you again for your kind words.
Thanks very much, dearest you.
Hmmm. I wonder. I don’t recall very much about his mother, except that she was the native of Argentina and his father was the immigrant from Italy.
Fair question. As a Christian, it is my duty and responsibility to point out heresy in the church.
“You attacked the Catholic position, which can be summarized as “Every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration.”
But the problem isn’t that Bergoglio is telling Catholics to “respect their dignity”. It’s in telling Catholics to actually respect their homosexuality. This was a Vatican statement issued in 2014:
“Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community. Are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?”
Now...there was supposedly some backtracking after the reaction came from real Catholics (a minority within their own church). But this official statement is like throwing a baited hook into a pond and gauging the response. This most recent statement is just another baby step in the direction of degeneracy (notice I didn’t say “modernism”).
I converted to Catholicism back in 2004 (baptized on Easter). I have been a member of the Knights of Columbus almost since that time. But God so help me I’ll not set foot back in a Catholic Church until both this Pope and Magisterium are culled and statements strongly endorsing the traditional papal teachings of the Church are affirmed. If that NEVER happens, then it’ll confirm my fears...that the earthly authority never truly flowed from the Chair of Peter, but instead with a body of Christians that may have overlapped the Catholic Church, but were/are still independent of it.
I’m not happy to talk this way. In fact, this past year of Bergoglio’s “reign” has been the saddest of my time as a Catholic. Beseech the Blessed Mother and all the Saints to pray for the wounded Church. God is the only thing that can save it now.
Can you link that troubling quote directly to a published Vatican document ?
If by "misunderstood" you refer to the belief that the events of Genesis 1-11 actually happened, then you are merely proving my point.
Why should I take the CCC seriously if nineteen hundred years of Papal and conciliar decrees are now a dead letter?
Of course. Then Protestantism came along and the Catholic Church latched onto evolutionism and (Protestant-created) higher criticism in order to disprove the "Protestant" bible and to prove the need for oral tradition.
That was before Catholic bibles contained higher critical commentary. Don't tell me you haven't noticed.
"And it all began by adopting a low view of the Bible in reaction to Protestantism (something no “conservative” Catholic will admit)."
You are 100% wrong about that.
You must mean I am 100% wrong that no Catholic will admit that this is true. I am happy to hear it.
You could not possibly mean that I'm wrong about the Catholic Church's irreverent attitude toward the Bible. I'm sure your book shelf is full of Catholic bibles with higher critical commentary.
I just got in a car. And am on my wifes phone. You can probably google it under “Vatican 2014 homosexuality statement” or something like that.
Pope Frankie grew up in Buenos Aires in the forties, during the era of Juan Peron, the Castro/Noriega of his day. Add to that the reality that he is a Jesuit leftist and you have a hard Socialist as head of the Church of Rome. Were he gone tomorrow it wouldn’t be soon enough.
The damage that the ordination of active homosexuals, to the Priesthood, has done to the ageless reputation of the Church; is obviously beyond the intellectual reach of this moron. Consequently, the road of redemption for the Church has gotten that much longer, every day he remains Pontiff.
I did. There is no link to any published Vatican document, just various news outlets. Apparently there was a working version that included some language to that effect, and it was rejected. Consider it a spurious text purporting to be holy yet lacking the Holy Spirit and not even worth publishing.
“Pope is telling you that if you don’t accept homosexuals, you are a bigot.”
Fascist homosexual pope? I think so.
Since when did the Catholic Church go Anglican?
I don’t understand! Is the Pope saying that we should accept them doing something wrong? If not, what is he saying?
I accept everyone at face value. Somebody who comes to me doing something abhorrent is not going to be acceptable no matter what. I have always accepted people as people as I am sure many others do. Somebody wanting me to accept their perversion is barking up the wrong tree. This is what I see the Pope as saying we should do. That is sinful in itself.
Seeing someone doing something wrong and telling them they are okay is wrong. It is spoken about in the bible in more than one place. You are doing something wrong when you do accept what they are doing. I will not do it!
‘The priest’s job is to find the right balance that welcomes people to God’s grace without supporting the confusion that people who reject God’s word try to generate.’
Whether it is the priest, the preacher, or the lay member, we all have to find the right balance. In my opinion, this is in your face by this pope. Doesn’t he understand, especially in America, there is effort by most Christians to be fair? We avoid some things because God says to follow Him first. By allowing ourselves into some situations, OUR own faith can be weakened. I do not consume alchohol and so therefore do not frequent the bar. That does not mean I think less of those that do. We know the homosexual needs the Lord too, and we can meet those who are seeking the Lord earnestly. The homosexual lobby will not stop, however much we give, and this pope should draw a hard line.
And their sin should be accepted?
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