I think the new FRomoan Catholic talking point goes something like this: He is a fallible man, he is not changing doctrine, blah, blah, blah. Over the last couple days I have heard this repeatedly, even if talking about something not related directly to Frankie.
My question is this: WHY did he single out this one lady to call? How did he KNOW enough about her plight to single her out.
Certainly there are some easy explanations, but there are some that are perhaps a bit more, shall we say, inconvenient.
Perhaps because she had sought an annulment or was in the tribunal process, which if the church finds the first marriage invalid...can have her new one accepted.
So you see, you or the original poster, don’t really know all the circumstances surrounding this ‘woman living in sin,’ from your secular viewpoint.
On the other hand, we only know what the woman alleges.
Father, I hate to correct a venerable priest, but I believe you are mistaken in your comment:
"Tereze,
I don't know what you mean by 'strange'. The real question is, 'Is the Pope a Catholic?' The only possible answer is in the affirmative, therefore any 'strangeness' is impossible, otherwise..., otherwise.... well, that is impossible to imagine, and millions of Catholics have been living a lie and our faith is built on sand."
No, it certainly would not mean that. Not at all. This kind of thinking is what got us into this mess. The pope is not the Faith. The pope does not give us the Faith. If the pope loses the Faith, I don't lose mine. If the pope is a heretic, an apostate, a schismatic or any of those horrible things, I don't have to be those things too.
The Faith comes from God not Rome. The papacy is a key unit of the Church, so having such a bad one would be a terrible thing, but absolutely no reason whatever for anyone to lose their Faith.
I personally think we are in a unique situation. I have asked many smarty-smart people, who know lots of history and theology, when there has been a comparable disastrous period in the Church, and each one of them has said something like, "Well, the Arian crisis comes close, but this is probably worse." And it is clear that the current worries about Francis are not isolated, unique or distinct from the general catastrophe that has befallen us.
Francis, if I may say something so dreadful, is a symptom - or perhaps the culmination - of the overall disaster that has become the ruling principle of the world since 1965. But again, this has no effect on the Faith. The Faith is simply the Truth. The Real. The realness of the Real does not change or fade because lots and lots of people want to deny it. Two and two still equal four. Marriage is still what it is. The Holy Eucharist is still the Holy Eucharist.
If the Papacy has been seized by bad men it does not mean that the things we believe are "built on sand". It means only that the papacy has been seized by bad men. Bad men will do what bad men do, and we can do nothing but maintain and continue to proclaim what we know is true throughout their reign.
Facing up to the possibility that something very bad is going on does not necessitate a loss of the Faith. Fearing that the sky will fall if there is a bad pope, fearing it so much that one tries to retreat into denial of what we see plainly before us, will do nothing to help anyone.
Facing up to what is really happening is the only way to maintain the Faith. Retreating and saying, "oh, that couldn't possibly happen and if it did then the Real is no longer the Real." is going to allow the disaster to spread still further.
Only the Real counts. And if the pope and all the cardinals and bishops of the world try to say that something other than the Word of Christ is true, then we reject that as a wicked lie. We know what is true because we have the Faith.
As laypeople (and humble parish priests) our duty is clearly before us. We don't have the power to stop bad men from doing bad things. But we have the power to continue to maintain the Faith, what we know. And to pray for a just solution to the terrible troubles of our times.