Posted on 07/07/2004 7:16:03 AM PDT by ultima ratio
Of course it does.
A Pope is elected according to very specific norms.
No one has ever presented a shred of evidence that these norms were not followed and everyone who participated in and monitored the election personally testified to its validity in writing.
Ballamand Agreement,
The Balamand Statement contains no contradictions with Catholic doctrine in any way.
It teaches that the Orthodox churches are in schism from the Catholic Church, that the schism is a sad historical situation, that the Orthodox churches contain legitimate sacraments and that the Church will pursue reconciliation at the highest level rather than an aggressive campaign of proselytization on the individual level. This is no different than the Council of Lyon.
Catholic Lutheran Accord
There is no "accord". There is a joint declaration, which states correctly in accordance with Catholic doctrine, that we are justified by God's grace.
and the Catechism (which had to be recalled shortly after publication).
The Pope promulgated the Latin editio typica, he did not promulgate the flawed vernacular translations.
you have presented no facts that demonstrate that he is Pope. I'm still waiting
You can play this game as long as you please. You are the one claiming that the Pope who is acknowledged by the entire Catholic world as Pope through legitimate election is an impostor.
The burden of proof remains on your shoulders. You need to explain why an election which was exact and correct in all particulars was, unbeknowst to everyone involved, flawed.
That is not what I said.
What I said is that our ability to perceive the essence of another person or thing outside ourselves is conditioned by the quality our faculties.
A mentally challenged person may never understand that the square root of 34,969 is 187 with the certainty and perspicuity that we do. This does not mean that this mathematical truth is true for us but not for him.
It means that his ability to perceive truth is limited by factors beyond his control. He can never attain our certainty given the inadequacy of his faculties.
St. Thomas points out that since human beings cannot experientially know immortality in this life, that we do not understand that God is immortal - we merely know that He is not mortal as we are.
This approach is called negative theology and is well described in the first questions of the Summa.
Look, you can spend a lifetime trying to decipher the writings of John Paul II, I only have one life. I tried to get through a few of his encyclicals--not to mention Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which I found interminable and impenetrable. I detest his kind of writing--the deliberate vagueness, the incessant qualifications, the inability to express a thought simply and clearly. Take just the paragraph I posted. What the heck does it mean to say Man is the way for the Church to follow?
You make a noble try, putting this in traditional terms, saying as you do that by means of the Incarnation God has ennobled us and taught us to be charitable. But that is not exactly what JPII is saying. If it were, he would have focused on Jesus. But it suggests instead pretty much what Gaudium et Spes had advocated--a rapprochement with the Modern World and an acceptance of its systems of thought and discovery. It is this that is fraught with danger--especially when the Pope argues such a path it is the PRIMARY way the Church must take. This is dangerous talk. It is not at all the stuff of tradition. It is Vatican II-speak, a path that has so-far led, not to the promised land, but to the edge of a very steep cliff.
The concept is repeatedly articulated in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church, that through his incarnation and resurrection, Christ initiated the process of sanctifying all creation. Indeed, it's to acknowledge this same idea that Catholics kneel at the "et incarnatus est".
Unprecedented? At the council of Ephesus, Mary was proclaimed to be the Theotokos -- the Birthgiver of God.
...for instance, the subtitle that begins paragraph 25 is "Mystery of Christ, mystery of man." He then says that the Rosary has "anthropological significance," and he claims, as he already did at the very beginning of his pontificate in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, that Christ's life reveals "the truth about man."
Well if Christ is not the truth about man, then there is no truth. Christ explains man's existence, his purpose, his end. Christ is man's destiny because Christ is not only Alpha but Omega, and man's sole hope for survival is in the Logos Who imparts meaning to creation.
"It was Athanasius, echoed by Aquinas, who said that "God became man so that man might become God."
We see this everyday right here on FR.
Sorry but I trust the Palm Beach County chad counters more than the College of Cardinals.
The Balamand Statement contains no contradictions with Catholic doctrine in any way.
The Balamand Statement reads: "In this spirit Pope John Paul II and Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I together stated clearly: "We reject every form of proselytism, every attitude which would be or could be perceived to be a lack of respect" (7 December 1987)". The Orthodox don't believe Mary was free from original sin. They also believe artifical birth control is not always sinful, and John Paul II says we shouldn't proseltize? That my friend, contradicts Catholic teaching.
There is a joint declaration, which states correctly in accordance with Catholic doctrine, that we are justified by God's grace.
It also incorrectly states that the joint declaration "encompasses a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification and shows that the remaining differences are no longer the occasion for doctrinal condemnations.” So we are no longer supposed to condemn falsehoods?
Please see Catholic Lutheran Joint Declaration Balamand Statement. Enough heresies in just those two documents alone.
No, it won't. There will be a refinement of VII, as there was of Trent.
It is so facile to blame VII. It is, in fact, the fallacy of "propter hoc, ergo propter hoc" to say that Vatican II caused all the ills of the world.
Every denomination in the West has undergone the same phenomenon.
He seems to be such a good man otherwise. I know he has had to walk a fine line with people of other religions, and I try to cut him some slack for the good he has done. He has reached out to all peoples which is what I think popes are supposed to do.
He has come down out of his ivory tower and mingled with the masses which I don't believe any other pope has done before. But, but . . . what is he saying and what is he supposed to be saying???
Fair enough. Very few Catholics have spent the lifetime of study it takes to study the full scope of the thought of St. Augustine and St. Thomas. A lesser thinker like Pope John Paul II is a tall order.
I tried to get through a few of his encyclicals--not to mention Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which I found interminable and impenetrable. I detest his kind of writing--the deliberate vagueness, the incessant qualifications, the inability to express a thought simply and clearly.
It's true that he lacks a direct or pithy style. He is practically the first Pope, at least since Innocent III, to attempt to do original theology while in office.
Take just the paragraph I posted. What the heck does it mean to say Man is the way for the Church to follow?
Again, it has to be placed in its full context - that Christ chose the way of man, i.e. Incarnation, to redeem man and that the Church which is Christ's mystical Body must follow in the Redeemer's footsteps.
I'll point out that in the original Latin "homo" is not capitalized.
You make a noble try, putting this in traditional terms, saying as you do that by means of the Incarnation God has ennobled us and taught us to be charitable. But that is not exactly what JPII is saying.
Well, it's only part of what he's saying.
If it were, he would have focused on Jesus.
Again, read the encyclical before making this blanket statement. The entire encyclical is about Christ as He is Incarnate. To say that the encyclical is not focused on Jesus is facile.
But it suggests instead pretty much what Gaudium et Spes had advocated--a rapprochement with the Modern World and an acceptance of its systems of thought and discovery.
Again, this is not a path that is unique to Vatican II. The early Church did not confine itself to Jewish methods of inquiry and investigation but embraced the Neoplatonism of the Greek world it encountered. The great Fathers of the Church spoke in an idiom which was not invented by the Church, but adapted.
Likewise, St. Thomas baptized an Aristotle which had been heavily tainted or modified by Arabic and Jewish interpretation.
We need to creatively confront unChristian methods and assumptions now as then.
It is this that is fraught with danger--especially when the Pope argues such a path it is the PRIMARY way the Church must take.
The encyclical does not say that the Church must take the path of modernity - it says that the Church must follow the steps that Christ traced.
This is dangerous talk. It is not at all the stuff of tradition. It is Vatican II-speak, a path that has so-far led, not to the promised land, but to the edge of a very steep cliff.
I agree that Vatican II has been a notable failure and that its policies are deeply flawed. This does not mean that we simply abandon the outside world and turn inward - it means that we need to find better methods.
Every denomination? What about the charismatic and evangelical denominations?
OK.
Then you have no way of ever ascertaining who is Pope and who isn't, and therefore there is no point in being a Catholic.
The Orthodox don't believe Mary was free from original sin. They also believe artifical birth control is not always sinful, and John Paul II says we shouldn't proseltize? That my friend, contradicts Catholic teaching.
Rejecting forms of proselytism which are perceived as disrespectful is not contrary to Catholic teaching.
The Church chooses now, as it chose in the 1200s to approach the issue of reconciliation between the Catholics and the Orthodox on the highest level rather than sending out missionaries.
The fact that the Orthodox find themselves in doctrinal error does not mean that the Church is not allowed to make prudential decisions in its methodology for bringing them back into the fold.
It also incorrectly states that the joint declaration "encompasses a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification and shows that the remaining differences are no longer the occasion for doctrinal condemnations.”
That is, the Lutherans now accept that the grace of salvation precedes any personal act or profession of faith - that it is God's grace which saves and not simply the personal mental state of the believer.
It also means that the doctrinal errors of the Lutherans do not require any new condemnations of their teachings - the Church's position has already been substantially stated. Nothing new about Lutheran errors was discovered which would occasion some further condemnation.
You don't get the import. It's all about Gaudium et Spes--that the Modern World is the measure of truth, not the other way around, that the Church must follow Man, not Man the Church. It is all ass backwards and has already had disastrous practical consequences.
Those aren't "denominations," unless you consider Baptist churches a "denomination."
In truth, they're individual congregations who follow the whims of whomever the pastor is.
Most of the experience of belonging to an evangelical church is emotional.
Granted that Mr. Derksen over reached on some of his points unnecessarily, when his point was made very well with less words rather than more.
That he chose the route of sedevacantism to register his frustration doesn't really take away from his arguments, just calls to mind his rash judgement.
The facts he points out speak for themselves. The Church is literally falling apart, and if we are to give any credence to Derksen at all, John Paul is reliving his liberal college theses, and is imposing on the Church, themes, that only affected college students, and their liberal proffesors would sit around discussing. Themes that have no answers, only questions.
It explains Assisi I and II--which are a scandal to the rest of us and a violation of the First Commandment.
"Humanism" does not explain these phenomena. Disciplinary slackness and overeager eirenicism does."
We don't know that it is a disciplinary slackness. To even think that is to suggest JP is not in charge - or worse - that he is so out of it he doesn't even know.
To me, it seems like a natural extension of every goofy thing he has done, and a logical progresion of his continuing theme of 'humanism'. I'm not qalified to really comment on his scholarship, but I can look at the fruits. (come on now, we all know some of his actions were goofy, and not Catholic)
"This Pontiff's grounding is not in Thomistic realism but in the methodologies of personalism and phenomenology--where truth itself is a shifting thing, according to one's experience of it."
"Phenomenology does not posit that truth is a shifting thing. It posits that our knowledge of a thing or person is always imperfect because our faculties of perception are not infallible."
I don't know what phenomonology posits, but to say that it is not a 'shifting thing' but is imperfect because we are imperfect, (and it depends on how we perceive it) tells me that whatever it expounds should not be an article of faith.
Don't we have real things to iron out, rather than the subjectivity of of something as elusive as quicksilver?
The Pope, if we are to believe his mandate, is to lead everyone that he has been given to salvation, just as Jesus told His Father that he has lost none that he had been given.
If the Pope wants to dabble in this crap in his spare time, fine. But let's not foist it on pilgrims who have a hard enough time finding their own way. Reaffirm in us the basic principles such as Grace, sin, Hell, chastity, reverence, etc. Not examining the lint in our belly buttons looking for Christ.
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