Pope Francis Is Diminishing the Papacy. Good

Sometimes I think Pope Francis is a gift to the Catholic Church, especially when he says something silly, clumsy, or even stupid. He allows serious Catholics to take the papal cult less seriously than they have been doing for generations. Overall, that’s a good thing.

It began almost gently, as a matter of style, with the way Pope Francis offered pungent insults in his homilies and interviews. He called out archetypes. He slammed what he called “airport bishops.” He characterized Christians who complain too much as “Mr. and Mrs. Whiner.” He belittled certain types of nuns as “old maids.” Suddenly, the almost Olympian dignity of the papacy was replaced by something else.

The cult that has surrounded the papacy in recent decades is not entirely Catholic. Much of it is driven by celebrity culture, and the demands of an unending news cycle. The pope functions in the mainstream media as a kind of living symbol of all Western religion. In the Catholic media, he’s the man who can move magazine covers, or get you to click. He’s the most famous Catholic, and he’s covered as if he were providing “the religious view” of current events.

One way or another, people look to him as a living oracle. Many believe, falsely, that a pope has the authority to change unpopular moral and theological teachings of the Church, as if he were the leader of a giant political party and decided that a few planks in the party platform needed to be changed to ensure his party’s relevance.

But in some ways, the exaggerated cult of the papacy has roots in the Church itself. The doctrine of papal infallibility as defined by the First Vatican Council was clearly a reaction to the age of revolution. Romantics within the Church wanted to re-invest the papacy with an authority that no politician or political movement could claim. The definition the Council promulgated fell far short of the ultramontanist ideal, and was in fact framed as a brake against novelty. The pope should invoke his infallible authority only when teaching what the Church has always taught and believed.

But faithful Catholics also used this doctrine of infallibility as a kind of security blanket during a long period of theological and doctrinal confusion. They reconciled their conviction that the Church was “indefectible” with the reality of apostasy all around them by clinging to the papal magisterium for stability. Joseph Ratzinger, first as a kind of ghostwriter for John Paul II and then as Benedict XVI, gave that sense of unshakeable solidity to the papacy.

Francis is now something less than a symbol of religion, or the living representative of Catholic faith on earth. He’s not a sign from God for all living in this moment. Through his own loquacity, he’s reduced himself to a stereotype that has become familiar to many Catholics: He’s the old liberal, who is just appalled by the young Huns entering his religious order.

Last week, Pope Francis was speaking to a group of liturgists in Rome, and summing up the 20th-century history of liturgical reform in the Roman Church. He told a very simple story of how conservative popes encouraged reforms throughout the 20th century, and then the Second Vatican Council issued its opinion, shortly thereafter, that there should be a new liturgy in the vernacular, one that encouraged more lay participation. In the midst of this clichéd and not altogether illuminating hash of history, he used language invoking his authority as pope in a rather clumsy way. “We can affirm with certainty and magisterial authority that the liturgical reform is irreversible.”

This little sentence caused liturgical traditionalists to erupt in shock and horror, and liturgical progressives to chortle in victory. But all this is premature. In the era of Francis, papal utterances no longer end debates — partly because Francis seems to open up debates that were previously closed under the previous pontificates, and partly because no one can quite tell you what, specifically, Francis means, or if he means anything at all.

How can a process of reform be “irreversible,” if it is also subject to continuing revision and application? “The practical application,” Pope Francis admitted in the same address, “is still ongoing.” In reality, the pope was merely gesturing at his great authority, as if that itself settled an ongoing dispute in the Church about whether the modern liturgical reform was a success or a dead end. In a way, he was trying to use papal authority as a kind of video-game cheat-code. And by doing so, he has once again reduced it.

Simply put, we don’t have to listen to popes when they are talking out of their rear ends. What Francis describes as an orderly procession of liturgical reform in the 20th century will very likely one day be seen as one of the greatest spams of iconoclasm in the history of Christianity.

And the fact that Francis is so wrong on this, as on many other things, will, one hopes, break the exaggerated papal cult once and for all. This period of time in the Church, in which its lay intellectuals and bishops turn almost exclusively to recent papal utterances rather than to Scripture and the doctors of the Church, will one day look very unusual. In God’s permissive will, and in his Providence, Pope Francis is hastening that day. For that I’m grateful.

I'll bet he's one of the few Catholics whom you don't feel threatened by.

7Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard.

8On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining.

9The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now.

10The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him.

11But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. 1 John 2:7-11 NASB

As a follower of Christ and in obedience to what He teaches, I forgive you of anything you have said towards me in the past and will do so going forward.

As a follower of Christ, I apologize to you for any hurtful comments directed toward you and ask for your forgiveness of the same.

Have a good evening ebb.

You are not surprised because you are an illiterate who picks up his theological vocabulary from the mass media.

7Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard.

8On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining.

9The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now.

10The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him.

11But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.

Have a good evening Arthur.

It's a strange phenomenon: a hundred years ago, few people even knew what the Pope looked like, let alone what he sounded like. What little they did know of him came from their parish priest.

With the advent of radio, there grew among many a fascination with just hearing the Pope's voice, and television only enhanced that - Pius XII was not an uncommon sight on the box back then.

It just seems to have increased in intensity since then, particularly, as you point out, with JPII (cries of "Santo sùbito!" echoing through the streets of Rome and elsewhere the minute he died).

As you say, very unseemly.

Question: "What is the definition of a cult?"

Answer: When people hear the word cult, they often think of a group that worships Satan, sacrifices animals, or takes part in evil, bizarre, and pagan rituals. However, in reality, a cult rarely involves such things. In fact, a cult, in the broadest sense of the word, is simply a religious system with particular rites and customs.

Usually, though, a cult is more narrowly defined, and the word refers to an unorthodox sect whose members distort the original doctrines of the religion. In a Christian context, the definition of a cult is, specifically, “a religious group that denies one or more of the fundamentals of biblical truth.” A cult is a group that teaches doctrines that, if believed, will cause a person to remain unsaved. A cult claims to be part of a religion, yet it denies essential truth(s) of that religion. Therefore, a Christian cult will deny one or more of the fundamental truths of Christianity while still claiming to be Christian.

The two most common teachings of Christian cults are that Jesus was not God and that salvation is not by faith alone. A denial of the deity of Christ results in the view that Jesus’ death was insufficient to pay for our sins. A denial of salvation by faith alone results in the teaching that salvation is achieved by our own works. The apostles dealt with cults in the early years of the church: for example, John addresses the teaching of Gnosticism in 1 John 4:1–3. John’s litmus test for godly doctrine was “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (verse 2)—a direct contradiction of the Gnostic heresy (cf. 2 John 1:7).

The two most well-known examples of cults today are the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. Both groups claim to be Christian, yet both deny the deity of Christ and salvation by faith alone. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons believe many things that are in agreement with or similar to what the Bible teaches. However, the fact that they deny the deity of Christ and preach a salvation by works qualifies them as cults. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and members of other cults are moral people who genuinely believe they hold the truth. As Christians, our hope and prayer must be that many people involved in cults will see through the lies and will be drawn to the truth of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

https://www.gotquestions.org/cult-definition.html

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