Posted on 08/01/2018 9:10:58 AM PDT by Morgana
God forbid a Catholic priest preaches what the Catholic Church teaches. But because of that, Mary Elizabeth Williams, a staff writer for Salon and self-proclaimed Catholic, doesnt know how she can be Catholic anymore.
Williams parish got assigned a new priest who is outspokenly pro-life and for traditional marriage, she wrote in a July 29 piece. Thats not a surprise, as these beliefs are in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But apparently this newfound information caused her to walk out of Mass. She agrees with a Catholicism that is spirituality rooted in real world action, one that speaks out from the pulpit against greed and violence and praised her parish for collecting food for the poor. But a priest teaching doctrine is the other kind of Catholicism, the bad kind.
She and her daughter flinched when he spoke of traditional marriage, which can only be between a man and woman," she wrote. She knew the Vatican's official stance on marriage equality, but preferred the previous priest who quoted Pope Francis unverified statement about gay marriage (God makes us who we are and loves us as we are).
The major thing that set her off and caused her to walk out was his position on abortion. She had to figure out where my daughters and I fit in within a culture that is inhospitable to women, she wrote. This inhospitality has become intolerable, she added, because the priest dared to quote Mother Teresa saying that "the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself."
She continued to write about why this is harmful to a woman, using a 2012 story of a pregnant teen with leukemia who, according to the CNN link she provided, had been undergoing chemotherapy, died from complications of the disease. But according to Williams, the teen was denied chemo because she was pregnant. Seems like she didnt thoroughly read the link.
She doesnt expect any parish to contradict the church's official stance on key issues, however, she said a priest cannot speak authoritatively on the motivations of women with regard to their own bodies because he has never faced that choice or likely even spoken honestly with someone who has.
Afterwards she had a talk with her 14-year-old daughter about what to do when our personal beliefs don't match up with what someone in authority says we should do. Its probably safe to say she will not be returning to Mass, claiming that it's not our beliefs that have changed; it's our staffing.
Here’s the original Salon article. Just out of this world!
https://www.salon.com/2018/07/29/i-dont-know-how-to-be-catholic-any-more/
It’s a real poverty when a person views instruction from the pulpit as a “staffing” problem and not a time to search their own heart.
The Catholic church is perfectly Catholic.
Salon is too Satanic.
That’s terrible! But true!
The worst part of her piece is the anti-historical twaddle about abortion being hunky-dory in the Catholic Church until 1869 and various saints and scholars disputing fetal ensoulment. We’ve heard this same revisionist nonsense from Nancy Pelosi et al., and the fact that this sort of urban legend keeps popping up shows how poorly the Catholic Church is doing its job in getting the truth out there about its own teachings.
I find life is a lot happier and more productive if I don’t waste it reading Salon.
Where’s her church? Maybe I’ll move there.
Not anymore, the ImPopester is turning it into a tool of the New World Order.
ImPopester.
Very true.
A coup ousted the geniune Pope.
I notice that there is no mention of a husband/father.
I cannot say for sure as there is not enough data in the article, but if there is no husband/father, could it be because the author also does not know what it is like to be a woman.
You mean like this??
Augustine believed that an early abortion is not murder because, according to the Aristotelian concept of delayed ensoulment, the soul of a fetus at an early stage is not present, a belief that passed into canon law.[23][24] Nonetheless, he harshly condemned the procedure: "Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born."(De Nube et Concupiscentia 1.17 (15))
Thomas Aquinas, Pope Innocent III, and Pope Gregory XIV also believed that a fetus does not have a soul until "quickening," or when the fetus begins to kick and move, and therefore early abortion was not murder, though later abortion was.[10][23][not in citation given] Aquinas held that abortion was still wrong, even when not murder, regardless of when the soul entered the body.[60] Pope Stephen V and Pope Sixtus V opposed abortion at any stage of pregnancy.[23][24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_thought_on_abortion#Early_Christianity
PIP: This article traces the history of the abortion policy of the Roman Catholic Church. The introductory section notes that the Church has consistently opposed abortion as evidence of sexual sin but has not always regarded it as homicide because Church teaching has never been definitive about the nature of the fetus. In addition, the prohibition of abortion has never been declared an infallible teaching. The chronology starts with a sketch of events in the first six Christian centuries when Christians sought ways to distinguish themselves from pagans who accepted contraception and abortion. During this period, Christians also decided that sexual pleasure was evil. Early Church leaders began the debate about when a fetus acquired a rational soul, and St. Augustine declared that abortion is not homicide but was a sin if it was intended to conceal fornication or adultery. During the period of 600-1500, illicit intercourse was deemed by the Irish Canons to be a greater sin than abortion, Church leaders considered a woman's situation when judging abortion, and abortion was listed in Church canons as homicide only when the fetus was formed. St. Thomas Aquinas declared that a fetus first has a vegetative soul, then an animal soul, and finally a rational soul when the body was developed. The next period, 1500-1750, found anyone who resorted to contraception or abortion subject to excommunication (1588), saw these rules relaxed in 1591, and banned abortion even for those who would be murdered because of a pregnancy (1679). From 1750 to the present, excommunication was the punishment for all abortions (1869). This punishment was extended to medical personnel in 1917, but the penalty had exceptions if the woman was young, ignorant, or operating under duress or fear. In 1930, therapeutic abortions were condemned, and, in 1965, abortion was condemned as the taking of life rather than as a sexual sin. By 1974, the right to life argument had taken hold and became part of a theory of a "seamless garment" representing a consistent ethic of life. The current Pope recognizes that the moment of ensoulment is unknown but condemns abortion in all cases (except as the unintentional byproduct of another medical procedure).Conscience. 1996 Autumn;17(3):2-5.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12178868
1) Your belief that the Church's ethic against abortion dates back only to the 1800's, is incorrect. It dates back to the Didache, the 1st century catechism which appeared almost contemporaneously with the completion of the NT canon. Its roots? The realization that God named and called the prophets "from their mothers' wombs," and the wonderful passage from Luke where the Holy Spirit is poured upon a woman (!)(Elizabeth) and her unborn son (!)(John the Baptist --- a.k.a. John the Fetus). The point: both are persons in the full sense of the word.
2) Upon contact with Aristotelian philosophy, there was debate over whether abortion was homicide or "merely" closely akin to homicide. This legalistic/ theoretical distinction arose from a total ignorance of the human genome. However, abortion was in *any* case ethically offensive, whether it was the killing of a "formed" and "quickened" human or "merely" the destruction of a becoming- human.
3) Your account of the death of Savita Halappanavar is inaccurate. She died because of series of malpractice events, her blood sepsis not being diagnosed and treated in a timely way. Not caused by denial of termination.
TRYING to turn it into a tool of the NWO. He will not prevail.
Sincerely. If even one person reads your info. and is curious about it, it would be worth the effort.
In fact, Catholic teaching all the way back to the Didache (late first century) correctly identifies abortion as a violation of the commandment "Thou shalt not kill," later debates about ensoulment notwithstanding.
Rome likes to color it's history on this issue and a lot of other issues.
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