Posted on 02/08/2019 8:26:13 AM PST by ebb tide
Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska has said there is “uncertainty and confusion” within the Church over moral teaching, including “at a very high level” of the hierarchy.
While praising Pope Francis, the bishop also discussed the role of the papacy, saying that even popes “cannot overturn what has been infallibly taught”.
Bishop Conley’s remarks came in an interview with Professor Robert George of Princeton University, which appears as a chapter in a new book, Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome.
The bishop was asked about the divisions within the Church. He replied that “there seem to be some voices within the Church, some at a very high level, that are calling into question some fundamental truths about the human person”. Bishop Conley, who chairs the US bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, said he was especially referring to truths about marriage and sexuality.
“These truths have long been taught by the Church,” Bishop Conley told Professor George, “and were strongly reaffirmed by Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict. Questions concerning the nature and function of conscience, sin and the moral act, intrinsic evil, and the natural law.”
Bishop Conley said that “some voices” were “very disturbing. And some of them are very important voices – theologians and even bishops, archbishops, and cardinals”. But despite these “deepening divisions”, the bishop said he was not “shaken”. “I have confidence that the Holy Spirit will eventually sort it all out and not let the Church go off the rails.”
Bishop Conley said he thought Pope Francis upheld the Church’s teachings. The bishop also considered “what the faithful Catholic would be bound by conscience to do if, God forbid, his or her properly formed conscience were to come into conflict with something a pope says. It could be Pope Francis or any pope.”
Under such circumstances, the bishop argued, it would be necessary to “go with the sensus fidelium” – “the belief of the Church through the ages, yesterday, today, and forever”. Bishop Conley distinguished between the sensus fidelium – “the Church’s firm, constant, and true teaching” – and modern dissent about, for instance, contraception.
Bishop Conley said that there were “rare” times in history when a pope has said “something that contradicts or is logically inconsistent with the firm and constant teaching of the Church on a matter of faith or morals”. If this happens, he said, it is important to remember that “the pope cannot overturn what has been infallibly taught, whether by the papal magisterium itself or by an ecumenical council or by the ordinary universal magisterium.” Popes are “not dictators”, he said, and “the faith of the Church does not lie in a pope”.
Bishop Conley said that Blessed John Henry Newman could help Catholics to “understand the office of Peter, especially in the present pontificate”. While Newman “had a very healthy respect, obedience, and admiration for the papacy”, he also “knew that not every utterance that came out of a pope’s mouth is necessarily authentic Christian doctrine.” Bishop Conley said this awareness made Newman unpopular with powerful figures, and may have prevented Newman from being made a bishop.
Bishop Conley contradicts his entire argument with this:
Bishop Conley said he thought Pope Francis upheld the Church’s teachings.
Ping
For decades the Church tolerated, defended and covered up rampant homosexuality among the clergy including sexual predators. Now the Church cannot more than tepidly admonish in name only Catholics like Gov Cuomo who are celebrating infanticide. The Church has long since relinquished any moral teaching authority when there is such hypocrisy.
Bishop Conley contradicts his entire argument with this:
Bishop Conley said he thought Pope Francis upheld the Church’s teachings.
He is still speaking Church language: With effort and squinting Pope Francis’ statements can in some way be conformed to the traditional way Church teaching is understood, but what many cardinals are saying can’t be conformed by applying the same techniques.
I.E. many cardinals are way farther out than the Pope—and thus are more obvious (and safer, esp. if you are a Bishop) subjects of criticism.
I disagree. I don't see how any good Catholic could "sguint" around this:
The Pope’s Endorsement of Argentina’s Amoris Guidelines: What It Means
We are witnessing a continuing slow motion schism.
The Pope isn’t stating things himself, he is letting other people state stuff on which he comments. This can be understood as cowardice, but traditionally is a way in which Pope’s indicate that they want people to treat something seriously without actually using Papal magisterial authority.
That he can’t actually come out and say the thing himself says something.
At any rate, we can probably all agree that if the Pope said what a number of cardinals have said, the situation would be worse.
Again, I must respectfully disagree. I, too, once thought Francis exercised his heresies by stealth, through others. Like when his atheist friend published an interview in which Francis supposedly said there are no souls in Hell; the souls are merely extinguished. To this date, Bergoglio has never confirmed nor denied this heresy. That's a stealth heretic.
But with time, he has now become both formal and public with his heresies; e.g.:
“It is not licit that you convince them of your faith; proselytism is the strongest poison against the ecumenical path.”
This is not what his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, thought nor practiced.
Pope again criticizes ‘proselytism’: ‘It is not licit that you convince them of your faith’
Then there's this:
247. We hold the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked, for “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). The Church, which shares with Jews an important part of the sacred Scriptures, looks upon the people of the covenant and their faith as one of the sacred roots of her own Christian identity (cf. Rom 11:16-18). As Christians, we cannot consider Judaism as a foreign religion; nor do we include the Jews among those called to turn from idols and to serve the true God (cf. 1 Thes 1:9). With them, we believe in the one God who acts in history, and with them we accept his revealed word.
The first statement is in a Wednesday audience. That is not formal teaching-—i.e. it lacks the form of universal teaching.
The second is ill-defined and in a formal document.
Through Pentecost the Church and Judaism were one—the chosen vessel of revelation. The same cannot be said of any other religion. It is more than sharing a document.
Things get complicated after pentecost, but the Jews are in a different category than Muslims and Mormons.
My initial statement could be slightly more nuanced, but I’m better off using the next hour to get some needed work done and get to Mass to pray for the mess than trying to figure out precisely what the mess is.
I wouldn't consider the following statement to be ill-defined:
With them (the Jews), we believe in the one God who acts in history, and with them we accept his revealed word. Evangelii Gaudium P. 247
I consider it to be formal heresy.
With them (the Jews), we believe in the one God who acts in history, and with them we accept his revealed word. Evangelii Gaudium P. 247
To the 1955 Good Friday Prayer for the conversion of the Jews:
Let us pray also for the faithless Jews: that Al-mighty God remove the veil from their hearts, so that they too might acknowledge Jesus Christ Our Lord.Let us pray.Almighty and eternal God, who does not exclude from Thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of Thy truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
Formal heresy is a technical term that requires a subjective assessment.
Believing Jews accept a portion of the revealed Word, so there are clarifying questions about the statement which you site that could be asked. After they are asked, one can utter St. Bernard’s meme—Defend, amend, or condemn.
Frankly, an orthodox Jew who believes in the divine inspiration of the Torah is likely less of a material heretic than 90% of contemporary Catholic Biblical Scholars.
Don't the Islamists and Mormons (whom you've mentioned) also accept a portion of the revealed Word?
Yes, I agree with what you are no doubt concluding: the first is “nicer”, and the second is charitable.
Today we don’t want people to feel bad in this life, and if they go to hell, who cares. But we still do pray the Our Father and the Hail Mary, which, if meditates upon and reflected upon in the first person plural, will help to counteract this Barney-the-Dinosaur theological schlock.
Give me Jeremiah and James along with Matthew and Malachi and send this pseudo-philanthropy to the devil. Did I mention that my screen name is the latin for Jerome, whom I follow and admire in many ways—I also have a first class relic of him on my desk.
Benedict XV’s Spiritus Paraclitus (English title on the 15th centenary of the death of St. Jerome) is a kick a** encyclical that does a lot of things, and one of them is point out that Jerome’s hatred of heresy and way of dealing with heretics is uber charitable and sadly lacking, even in 1920, from the virtues of many theologians and churchy people.
Negative on Islam—they hold that the Christian/Jewish version are corrupt.
I believe the Mormons hold the same thing-—and if you dig into their theology, you’d need to be insane to hold what bits of the truth they have retained along with the junk that Joseph Smith et al attempted to import. They make Mohammed look like St. Thomas, or at least Bonaventure.
Again, I disagree. The former is not "nicer"; it's heresy.
Jews, Muslims and Mormons. Which of these religions acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Son of God? Which of these religions worship the Holy Trinity?
What's with the term "Christian/Jewish version"? It's either one or the other. Is Jesus Christ the Son of God or not? Neither the Jews nor Islamist believe so.
What’s with the term “Christian/Jewish version”? It’s either one or the other. Is Jesus Christ the Son of God or not? Neither the Jews nor Islamist believe so.
My comment was in response to your post 13 with regards to the revealed word—
Jews and Christians accept the Torah, and the surviving strands of Judaism, in their orthodox forms, accept the bulk of the writings that together make the Old Testament—so on the written end of revelation, we accept all that they accept, and about one-quarter more. That is a great deal of overlap.
They don’t have all revealed truths, as you rightly point out, but they have a substantial part of revelation. Mormons and the Islamists believe that the writings have been corrupted, and also mix in a fair bit of garbage. It makes a big difference.
The former, provided that one understands the word “accept” in two different ways simultaneously, can be construed as two defensible statements. Doing so is at best too clever by half, may smack of duplicity, possibly coddling heresy, and could be a way of masking heresy—I will not judge which.
Please note the quotation marks around “nicer”.
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