Posted on 06/11/2017 9:37:54 PM PDT by ebb tide
In yet another of his curious pronouncements from the Vatican, Pope Bergoglio offered the following remarkable opinion at his General Audience this past Wednesday:
“We can be far, hostile; we can even say we are ‘without God.’ But Jesus Christ’s Gospel reveals to us that God cannot be without us: He will never be a God ‘without man’; it is He who cannot be without us, and this is a great mystery! God cannot be God without man: this is a great mystery! [Dio non può essere Dio senza l’uomo: grande mistero è questo!]”
In other words, according to Pope Bergoglio God needs man in order to complete His nature. Now, of course, any minimally catechized ten-year-old knows that God does not need anything whatsoever and that His creation of man was a gratuitous manifestation of His infinite love. Indeed, a being who needed anything would, by definition, not be God, the highest being and the ground of all other being, but some lesser being. For as even Plato recognized in the light of human reason alone, God must be “the sum of all perfections.”
It would be easy enough to dismiss Pope Bergoglio’s opinion as merely sloppy language resulting in nonsense. But it would appear that beneath the nonsense is something deeper and even more nonsensical, albeit more troubling for the Church: the “evolutionary theology” of Teilhard de Chardin in which Pope Bergoglio was steeped during his formation as a liberal Jesuit of the Sixties and Seventies, despite condemnation of Teilhard de Chardin’s heresies by the Holy Office under Pope John XXIII.
It was in fact Pope Bergoglio who, in his “green encyclical” Laudato si’, referred to the “contribution of Teilhard de Chardin” in a footnote to a passage wherein Pope Bergoglio declares: “The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, fulcrum of the universal maturation.” (The Vatican’s English translation is not faithful to the official Italian version, including the key Teilhardian phrase fulcro della maturazione universale [“fulcrum of the universal maturation”].)
That is, according to Pope Bergoglio, Christ attains the “fullness of God” through evolution because, through evolution, He has become a man risen from the dead and, as such, the “fulcrum of the universal maturation” who will lead all things to Teilhard’s imaginary Omega Point. Thus did Teilhard, a scientific as well as a theological fraud, implicated in the Piltdown Man hoax, have the audacity to assert in his The Heart of the Matter: “It is Christ, in very truth, who saves — but should we not immediately add that, at the same time, it is Christ who is saved by Evolution?”
LifeSiteNews, in an article by John-Henry Westen, has also taken note of Pope Bergoglio’s apparent attachment to Teilhardian “process theology,” which asserts that “God perfects himself by creation or grows with creation.” And while it is certainly true that given the Incarnation, God will henceforth never be without man, this is not the same as saying, as Bergoglio does, that God could not be God without man. As an orthodox theologian cited by LifeSite explains: “… God has absolutely no actual need of mankind, our relationship with God being entirely dependent on that gratuitous superabundance of the infinite Divine Love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
As Westen’s headline states: “We need another clarification.” None will be forthcoming if past Bergoglian practice is any indication. In any event, Catholics in a position to do so have a duty to present, yet again, the authentic teaching of the Church in order to counter the latest Bergoglian novelty. The acquiescence of silence is not an option.
In the beginning God...
Hey, Francis, ya stupid ass, “I am”.
Appropriate photo to fit the latest. Benedict is gone but Teilhardian theological science fiction is back! Read all about it in the global warming encyclical, Laudato Si’ as Ferrara points out.
This pope says the most un-Catholic things.
I remain thankful convert to the Catholic Church.
There have been bad popes before & Christ’s Church has always endured. I take comfort in this.
I really, really dislike this Pope.
A letter of resignation would be a great mercy.
The only mystery is how this man passed his theology exams. That statement is false. If he’s speaking in metaphors, sorry, it still is false.
Hey, Franky! Then please explain Genesis chapter 1. And John chapter 1. “In the beginning...”
Is the pope Catholic?
ummmm, No!
I hope he was misqhoted. There are some attributes of God that would not be on display without man. Mercy and justice ckme to mind.
it is He who cannot be without us, and this is a great mystery!
This could be poor word smithing on the part of the pope or bad theology. “Cannot be without us” could be a far stretch for “chooses to not be without us” if given the benefit of the doubt but on the other hand, words reveal the soul.
But this is his unofficial musings, not said in the OFFICIAL CAPACITY, so doesn’t mean anything /s.
I seriously am starting to wonder if Francis will live out his papacy, or whether he will leap off a high balcony, demanding that God, or perhaps Karl Marx, catch him.
From which ignominious end, the left will demand that he be declared a martyr to their cause, nothing more, and be honored by the church as a “secular saint”.
Plus a false prophet.
Bergoglian bombast.
One of the character weaknesses of self-important, totalitarian leaders with delusions of grandeur, is that they have a propensity for making outrageous, outlandish, self-aggrandizing statements when confronted with a captive audience which drinks in every word.
Francis fits the mold perfectly.
So, He was not God before He created man? What is this Pope smoking?
What makes you think that his “Catholic” seminary didn’t teach this?
And where are the Dubia Four on this matter?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.