Posted on 03/17/2013 9:59:05 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Its easy maybe too easy for people with progressive political views to dismiss the Roman Catholic Church as a vile anachronism, a nightmarish patriarchy of aging pedophiles, woman-haters, homophobes and/or closet cases that can offer nothing of value to the contemporary world. When it comes to the church hierarchy, and especially the Roman Curia, the corrupt and labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy that makes the Soviet-era Kremlin look like a model of transparency, that point of view seems more than justified.
But the church is not just the hierarchy, and as the spectacle of the last several days has demonstrated, there are millions or billions of people around the world Catholics and non-Catholics alike who wish the newly elected Pope Francis well and yearn to see in him the possibility of hope and renewal for this ancient, powerful and heavily tarnished institution that claims direct succession from the apostles of Jesus. As the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pope, Francis represents a break with tradition in several ways. Both the name he has chosen and his personal modesty and humility are meant to recall St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most adored figures in the Christian tradition, and no doubt also St. Francis de Sales, a 17th-century mystic, author and ascetic known for his devotion to the poor.
But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech.....
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
later
*YAWN*
Just have to laugh at these people. It’s pathetic.
People who want the Catholic Church to change its positions...
They want confirmation of their beliefs because deep down they know they’re wrong.
Of course. The proponents of SSM, married clergy, women priests, etc. don’t want to reform the RCC - they want to destroy it.
And to my Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ, I say -No matter what you think about transubstantiation, the primacy of the papacy, Marian aspects of the RCC etc., if the Pope and the RCC were gone, who can rally the world on behalf of the Culture of Life?
Tried to comment on Salon.com and you cannot unless you are one of the anointed.
And these are the people who belittle birthers? Well, obviously Pope Francis must be a fraud because he has failed to issue an encyclica proclaiming the Divinity of the Most Holy Barack Obama and canceling Easter since the Christ has been reincarnated.
The ‘free press’ is amusing.
But, dang-it-all, that Holy Spirit keeps interfering and messing things up!
Ummm..the Holy Spirit? Who needs no help from any man regardless of his title.
Funny stuff.
He is a strong Christian.
That will bug a great many posers.
As Fox and many other Catholic and ex-Catholic dissidents see it, Vatican II marked the moment when the church had the chance to reinvent itself as a flexible moral and spiritual force in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, it briefly seemed to do just that and its important to understand that Bergoglio, like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla before him, was part of the right-wing counterrevolution within the church that aggressively rolled back those changes, crushed dissident thought and reasserted the absolute power of the pope and his hierarchy.
Compare this with some observations made by Benedict XVI in his "farewell" meeting with Roman parish priests on 2/14/2013:
I would now like to add yet a third point: there was the Council of the Fathers the real Council but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council apart, and the world perceived the Council through the latter, through the media. Thus, the Council that reached the people with immediate effect was that of the media, not that of the Fathers. And while the Council of the Fathers was conducted within the faith it was a Council of faith seeking intellectus, seeking to understand itself and seeking to understand the signs of God at that time, seeking to respond to the challenge of God at that time and to find in the word of God a word for today and tomorrow while all the Council, as I said, moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of the journalists, naturally, was not conducted within the faith, but within the categories of today's media, namely apart from faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic: for the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different trends in the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of those who seemed to them more closely allied with their world. There were those who sought the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression "People of God", power for the people, the laity. There was this threefold question: the power of the Pope, which was then transferred to the power of the bishops and the power of all popular sovereignty. Naturally, for them, this was the part to be approved, to be promulgated, to be favoured. So too with the liturgy: there was no interest in liturgy as an act of faith, but as something where comprehensible things are done, a matter of community activity, something profane. And we know that there was a tendency, not without a certain historical basis, to say: sacrality is a pagan thing, perhaps also a thing of the Old Testament. In the New Testament it matters only that Christ died outside: that is, outside the gates, in the profane world. Sacrality must therefore be abolished, and profanity now spreads to worship: worship is no longer worship, but a community act, with communal participation: participation understood as activity. These translations, trivializations of the idea of the Council, were virulent in the process of putting the liturgical reform into practice; they were born from a vision of the Council detached from its proper key, that of faith. And the same applies to the question of Scripture: Scripture is a book, it is historical, to be treated historically and only historically, and so on.
We know that this Council of the media was accessible to everyone. Therefore, this was the dominant one, the more effective one, and it created so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering: seminaries closed, convents closed, banal liturgy and the real Council had difficulty establishing itself and taking shape; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council. But the real force of the Council was present and, slowly but surely, established itself more and more and became the true force which is also the true reform, the true renewal of the Church. It seems to me that, 50 years after the Council, we see that this virtual Council is broken, is lost, and there now appears the true Council with all its spiritual force.
Seems like Mr. Fox is a proponent of the "council of the media".
The LSM is always shocked, shocked I tell you to find out the Pope is (gasp) Catholic......
I’m not a Catholic so will tread lightly, but I fail to see why people like (ex Catholic, now Episcopalian) Rev. Fox think that becoming more like the Episcopalians is the way to make the Roman Catholic Church more relevant.
These articles can be used as a hedge against the great toilet paper shortage.
I’m constantly amazed at those are aren’t even Carholic offering opinions and ideas on how the Church should be..
Not legitimate? Gee, where have I heard that before?
Scoreboard: “Progressive” governments 100,000,000 dead
Catholic church ?
Vatican II was meant to keep the wheat and throw the chaff to the wind—not in terms of people but in terms of practice. Then the unchanging moral precepts of the Church would stand out nice and clear. Eventually. And that is what is going to happen now. Nice quotes from Benedict farther up the thread that say this in a different way.
The primacy of conscience should be understood on an individual level only, IMHO, and conscience has to be more scrupulous, not less, than that which conforms with Church teaching to the letter. With no one to tell you it’s all OK, you’d better be darn sure you’re right.
Good point. I think a lot of these old liberals just don’t realize how irrelevant they are becoming over time because the press and Democrats still worship them.
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