Posted on 08/28/2023 5:12:22 AM PDT by FarCenter
Comments Pope Francis made during a private discussion on a recent trip to Portugal criticizing the US Catholic Church, home to several of his more staunch opponents, have been made public in Italy.
Pope Francis has lamented a "very strong reactionary attitude" in the US Catholic Church, saying that ideology had replaced faith in some parts of it and some members had failed to understand "there is an appropriate evolution in understanding matters of faith and morals."
During his decade as pontiff, Francis has often faced criticism from conservative sectors of the US church, opposed to reforms such as giving women and lay Catholics more roles and making the church more welcoming and less judgmental towards some, including LGBT people.
The comments were made in Portugal on August 5, during a private meeting on Francis' trip to Lisbon with members of the Jesuit order the pope belongs to, but were scheduled to be published in full as part of the Italian Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica's end-of-August edition. Daily paper La Repubblica published excerpts in advance on Monday.
What was said?
During the question-and-answer session, a Portuguese Jesuit said that he was saddened while on a sabbatical in the US to find many Catholics, including some bishops, who were hostile to Francis' leadership.
"You have seen that in the United States the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude," Francis said. "It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally."
The liberal Argentine pontiff, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has also faced criticism from religious leaders and conservative media in the US on a host of his other stances, including climate change, immigration, social justice, gun control and opposing the death penalty as "neither human nor Christian."
"You have been to the United States and you say you have felt a climate of closure. Yes, this climate can be experienced in some situations," Francis told the questioner. "And there, one can lose the true tradition and turn to ideologies for support. In other words, ideology replaces faith, membership in a sector of the church replaces membership in the church."
Climate of closure? Why not call us deplorables, bitter clingers or listless vessels and be done with it?
...which makes him a Progressive Communist?
While I sure as sheet wouldn’t look at the US Catholic Church as a good example of anything, Frankie ain’t a good example of a Pope either.
That’s what he’s doing. Horrible man.
Now, THAT right there is funny!
“there is an appropriate evolution in understanding matters of faith and morals.”
No .
Some relatively early efforts by authentic U.S. lay Catholics at resisting Bergoglio seemed to have got under his skin and/or enraged him. Might have even been a well-timed and strongly-worded but relatively small-scale online petition that set Bergoglio off and got him started on a still-uninterrupted jihad against U.S. Catholics. IIRC, only 2500 U.S. lay Catholics signed it, no priests, bishops or cardinals. But boy did it spin him up.
Frankie da Pope has to remember. He was chosen by the non-Catholic radical left and their toady “news media” after they had Benedict thrown out on his ass. That whole thing was a sick Italian mafia joke. “Is the Pope a Catholic?” Nope.
more musings from Red Frank...
Yeah, well... it seems to me that doing away with the traditional Latin mass is somewhat "reactionary" and rooted in ideology vs. in faith. Just as is embracing the politically correct dictums of the globalists like "climate change" and homosexuality. Thou doth projectith much there, Francis.
His Bible fell apart and left stuff out.
Projection fer sure.
He is saying that scriptural truth must conform to the world.
Reactionary?
How Bolshevik of him.
US priests need to molest more kids to become “progressive” enough for the anti-pope.
Isn’t the Catholic Church supposed to be “reactionary”?
L
A Heaven sent admonition. What happens when fake fathers distort His instruction manual…. ‘Come out of her my people’.
There fixed it for you Your Holiness. The heart of faith and morals does not change. What was evil does not become acceptable and what was good does not become evil.
For instance, in the Middle Ages people even such luminaries as St Thomas Aquinas thought a child didn't have a soul until the quickening. Some could derive from that that abortion prior to that point is a lesser sin. Now we know that a child is unique and human from the moment of conception and that abortion at any stage is a grave evil. We have refined our understanding of the situation and can state more clearly that abortion at any stage is murder. Murder is still evil we have only expanded our understanding of when murder is murder.
By the same token abortion advocates try to argue that pro-life laws will prevent lifesaving treatment of a mother. Yet moral theology recognizes that in a situation where saving the mother necessitates the death of the child it is not murder so long as the death of the child is only an unfortunate outcome and not the intention. A carefully refined understanding of morality means acceptable laws can be written for these situations.
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