And Mormons use the words JESUS CHRIST on their buildings, too.
Posted on 04/19/2017 4:31:51 PM PDT by NYer
In the wake of a recent critical overview of the four years of Pope Francis’ papacy as presented by the German Catholic journalist Matthias Matussek, another German journalist (who is not a Catholic) has now raised his voice of resistance with respect to Pope Francis. We speak here about Jan Fleischhauer, who is an editor of the influential secular weekly magazine Der Spiegel, and who, in 2009, wrote a book about his change of conviction away from a leftist to a more conservative viewpoint.
On 17 April, Fleischhauer published a column in Der Spiegel which is entitled “Self-Secularization: The Sponti-Pope [i.e., the spontaneous Leftie Pope] ” (“Selbstsäkularisierung: Der Sponti-Papst”). With its subtitle, the author already indicates what he criticizes the current pontiff for:
Among Church critics, Pope Francis is much appreciated due to his pandering to the zeitgeist. Unfortunately, he thereby repeats the mistakes which the evangelical church has already committed.
Fleischhauer himself knows what he is speaking of here, because he himself was for many years a member of the Evangelical Church in Germany – mainly for political reasons. However, he later left the Protestant church and now describes himself only as a conservative. But he now also shows some admiration for the unmodernized Catholic Church when he writes:
The only Church which one can take seriously is the Catholic Church. I know that this sentence is for many readers an imposition, and I am also sorry that, of all years, I have to write this sentence in the Luther Year [of 2017].
Especially because he has seen some of the gravely defective adaptations of the Protestant church to the zeitgeist of his time, Fleischhauer now regrets that Pope Francis is now leading the Catholic Church into a similar ethos and direction. First, he describes his own admiration for the Catholic Church when he says that
Everything that critics bemoan about the Catholic Church – the Marian devotion, the cult of the Saints, the priesthood, the liturgy – is what, in my eyes, speaks for Catholicism. In addition, of course, to the length of time: an institution which is 2,000 years old has to be taken more seriously than one, let’s say, that is only 500 years old. Whoever was there first as Church, clearly has, when one deals with the last questions, the first position. Everything that [innovatively] comes later is, up to a certain point, heresy.
When speaking about his own final leaving of the Evangelical Church in Germany – at the moment of his own analogous change of political views – Fleischhauer explains just how weak the spiritual roots of Protestantism actually are:
Since the spiritual roots of Protestantism are thin, there is little that holds one back if one changes one’s worldview. A church in which not even the very existence of Heaven and Hell is binding becomes – for everyone who could only be kept in [the church] with the help of faith – a lost cause.
It is here that Fleischhauer sees that Pope Francis is now committing a comparably grave mistake:
If I am not mistaken, then, the Catholic Church is right now repeating the mistake of the Protestants. At its peak stands a man who shows a strange disdain for everything gradually grown and rootedly traditional and who enjoys surprising the Church people with thrown-down follies and jokes.
The German journalist then makes the explicit reference to Matthias Matussek’s own recent “fulminating text” and says that the Catholic Matussek “understands much about the importance of Dogma as a dam against the relativizations of the zeitgeist.” Fleischhauer places Matussek next to the German author Martin Mosebach, “another great Catholic reactionary.”
It seems that Fleischhauer understands more about what has happened to the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council than many Catholics of today, as he attempts to explain:
One could, if one wishes, see in [Pope] Francis the perfecter of a development which started with the Second Vatican Council. The first blow was taken against the liturgy between 1962 and 1965 – not accidentally a decade in which everywhere in the world the iconoclasts leaped greatly forward.
Here we Catholics are being rightly instructed by a German journalist as to how the Catholic Church removed “important elements of the centuries-old rite” because “she wanted to adapt to the zeitgeist”: “Priests no longer stood before the altar, but behind it, like behind a moderator’s table of the “Tagesthemen” [a German TV news show].” He also mentions here the thorough removal of the Latin language and the dubious permission of Communion in the hand. Piercingly, Fleischhauer adds:
Where they also took it especially seriously with the change of times, the clergymen themselves dragged the altars into the fields and chopped the Saints’ statues into pieces. For those without faith, these things might appear to be minor things, but, of course, it is not. Whoever has once assisted at a Mass in the old Tridentine Rite knows what the Church has lost when she succumbed to the 68-rush [cultural revolution of the 1960s].
Fleischhauer makes a prediction for the future of the Catholic Church, namely: if she follows the road the Protestants have taken, she will lose Church members and, consequently, will then consider adapting even more so to the zeitgeist in order to be purportedly more attractive. In the end, says the German journalist, the Catholic Church will have the same dilemma as the Protestants: “If the Church dissolves that which differentiates her from those other secular offers professing to give life a meaning – why then is the church still needed?” It is in this context that Fleischhauer sees the growth of Islam in the world which seems to move into the vacuum and to “fulfill spiritual needs better than the Christian competitor.”
This article written by Jan Fleischhauer is an uplifting as well as sobering event. It shows to us how elements of truth will always find their way into the minds of honest people. We have seemingly come to a point where modern man is becoming tired of the pervasive relativism – and its accompanying ideologies – for, they do not correspond to reality. Man has a thirst for the true, the trustworthy binding, and the beautiful. The modern world has mostly produced ugliness, loneliness and a lack of love.
Is it not time for all of us – inside and outside the Catholic Church – to make an effort to free ourselves cooperatively, to come out from under the “rubble” and thereby to find the way back to the deeper sources of trust and joy which can only be found in and through Jesus Christ Our Savior – and in His Sacramental Church?
So THAT’S where they get the phrase, “a little birdy told me”!
It is. But we need to stand together rather than fight each other.
Seems reasonable!
Thank you. I presumed you would like it. 😂😆
I know. For instance, presuming that that the #1 seed will beat the #8 seed, instead of being swept in 4 games.
Or is it too soon? ;-)
Where we find agreement we should, but we should also earnestly contend for the faith once delivered unto the saints as God's word admonishes us to do and fight against those who would pervert the gospel and lead others into their errors.
I'm surprised at how infrequently certain people join threads where our COMMON tenets are being discussed with those who reject the orthodox Christian beliefs. It almost seems like they prefer arguing against us than with us.
I don’t see that anyone in this thread has mentioned this, but I’m sure it’s crossed some people’s minds and it should be pointed out - The journalist being referred to in this article really is not a former evangelical Christian. What he actually was would be closest to a former mainline Protestant in America.
Remember, this is Europe we’re talking about, and specifically, Germany.
As we know, the heretical Evangelical Lutheran Church of America uses the word “evangelical.”
In Fleishhauer’s article, he mentions that he used to belong to the “EKD,” the “Evangelical Church of Germany.”
What is the EKD/ECG? “A federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and United (Prussian Union) Protestant regional churches and denominations in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of Protestants in that country.”
And it has an interesting history. There were attempts to unify the Protestant churches in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and then Hitler tried to do so as well:
“When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his administration tried to reorganize the old confederation into a unified German Evangelical Church as Hitler wanted to use a single Protestant church to further his own ambitions. This utterly failed, with the Confessing Church and the German Christians-led Reichskirche opposing each other. Other Protestant churches aligned themselves with one of these groups, or stayed neutral in this church strife. In 1948, the Evangelical Church in Germany was organized in the aftermath of World War II to function as a new umbrella organization for German Protestant churches.”
And differences between denominations have been largely erased:
“The member churches (Gliedkirchen), while being independent and having their own theological and formal organisation, share full pulpit and altar fellowship...”
Churches are even restricted from competing with one another:
“The regional Protestant church bodies accept each other as equals, despite denominational differences. No member church runs congregations or churches in the area of another member church, thus preventing competing with each other for parishioners.”
And theologically, the EKD is heretical.
” Ordination of women is practised in all 20 member churches with many women having been ordained in recent years. There are also several women serving as bishops. Margot Käßmann, former Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover and Chairperson of the Council of the EKD from 2009 until February 2010, was the first woman to head the EKD. Blessing of same-sex unions is practised and allowed in 18 of 20 member churches.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelical_Church_in_Germany
Up and down the floor did the men zoom;
To the cheers that shook up the room.
Please! Just hit the basket!
‘Tis not too much to ask, it
will keep all the fans from Boo ‘em!!!
If you use all your time bailing the boat; there’s not much left to pull on the oars!
And Mormons use the words JESUS CHRIST on their buildings, too.
Interesting.....
The newest thing going on there though is churches that fall outside of that structure and are Free Churches. Those religious communities are much more vibrant than the state sponsored churches.
Skates, not sneakers.
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