As was the Catholic priest, Martin Luther.
How do you argue that?
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Posted on 11/17/2017 3:03:09 PM PST by ebb tide
As an outsider, I can’t help but wonder whether the pope and the USCCB were particularly provoked by Weinandy’s suggestion that Jesus had allowed this controversy in order “to manifest just how weak is the faith of many within the Church, even among too many of her bishops.” Catholics will have to make up their own minds—but I’ll admit I have questions about the faith of Pope Francis, which seems, if not weak, at least different from that of the Catholic tradition.
Even before the release of Amoris Laetitia in March 2016, Francis had caused many to question his fidelity to that tradition. In 2014, the midterm report of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family recommended that pastors emphasize the “positive aspects” of cohabitation and civil remarriage after divorce. He said that Jesus’s multiplication of bread and fish was really a miracle of sharing, not of multiplying (2013); told a woman in an invalid marriage that she could take Holy Communion (2014); claimed that lost souls do not go to hell (2015); and said that Jesus had begged his parents for forgiveness (2015). In 2016, he said that God had been “unjust with his son,” announced his prayer intention to build a society “that places the human person at the center,” and declared that inequality is “the greatest evil that exists.” In 2017, he joked that “inside the Holy Trinity they’re all arguing behind closed doors, but on the outside they give the picture of unity.” Jesus Christ, he said, “made himself the devil.” “No war is just,” he pronounced. At the end of history, “everything will be saved. Everything.”
Weinandy and other Catholic critics have pointed to alarming statements and suggestions in Amoris Laetitia itself. The exhortation declares, “No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!” In December 2016, the Catholic philosophers John Finnis and Germain Grisez argued in their “Misuse of Amoris Laetitia” that though this statement reflects a trend among Catholic thinkers stemming from Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, it contradicts the gospels’ clear statements and the Catholic tradition’s teaching that there is “unending punishment” in hell. Finnis and Grisez charge that, according to the logic of Amoris Laetitia, some of the faithful are too weak to keep God’s commandments, and can live in grace while committing ongoing and habitual sins “in grave matter.” Like (Episcopalian) Joseph Fletcher, who taught Situation Ethics in the 1960s, the exhortation suggests that there are exceptions to every moral rule and that there is no such thing as an intrinsically evil act.
I take no pleasure in Rome’s travails. For decades, orthodox Anglicans and other Protestants seeking to resist the apostasies of liberal Christianity have looked to Rome for moral and theological support. Most of us recognized that we were really fighting the sexual revolution, which had coopted and corrupted the Episcopal Church and its parent across the pond. First it was the sanctity of life and euthanasia. Then it was homosexual practice. Now it is gay marriage and transgender ideology. During the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, we non-Catholics arguing moral theology could point to learned and compelling arguments coming out of Rome and say, in effect, “The oldest and largest part of the Body of Christ agrees with us, and it does so with remarkable sophistication.”
Those of us who continue to fight for orthodoxy, in dogmatic as well as moral theology, miss those days when there was a clear beacon shining from across the Tiber. For now, it seems, Rome itself has been infiltrated by the sexual revolution. The center is not holding.
Though we are dismayed, we must not despair. For the brave and principled stand made by Tom Weinandy reminds us that God raises up prophetic lights when dark days come to his Church.
Gerald McDermott holds the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School.
Not true.
That's bearing false witness against me. I have never said that and challenge you to prove otherwise.
By the way, the bible I read is not the one that Luther trashed to his own liking.
Fully documented and posted by daniel1212 numerous times.
Just obeying the golden rule, Schismatic Ebb.
Treat others the way you want to be treated; that IS in the Bible that you’ve outright bragged that you have better things to do than read, isn’t it?
You call us heretics; I’m guessing that means that you want it right back. After all, you’re such a holy Catholic and all and NEVER break the words of Jesus.
So, since obviously you want to be treated this way, I’m more than happy to comply, and return the favor to rub the evil committed by the Catholics in your face.
And old joke on whether or not Unitarians are Christians or what exactly do they believe: When Unitarians pray it is “to whom it may concern” rather than God, our Father or Jesus.
Dontcha just love how Catholics lecture us about how we non-Catholics have no right to define Catholicism cause we don’t know it, but they certainly feel free to define Protestantism?
They tell us we can’t say the pope is Catholic, heck they won’t even call the pope Catholic, but they sure can tell us he’s Protestant.
If it weren’t for double standards........
I'll make you a deal -- post the ***ENTIRE*** Catholic Mass showing how "little" the Mass is based on Scripture, and I'll respond, showing otherwise. Deal?
As was the Catholic priest, Martin Luther.
How do you argue that?
OUCH!!!!!!!
As was the Catholic priest, Martin Luther.
How do you argue that?
***
Well, considering that you refuse to define what makes a Catholic and what makes a Protestant... pretty hard to argue.
I mean, I could pull up a Catholic catechism, except for the fact that you’d get pissed off at me because it demands submission to the Roman pontiff and you hate the Roman pontiff.
Besides, I’m not here to spoon-feed you.
Completely true.
Hey, dan, you have those stats handy on about how much of the Bible Catholics hear at mass in their three year cycle?
I've never once defined Protestants. Some Catholics - Sure. All Catholics? -- Not a chance. Wanna try again?
I never spoke any falsehoods about you.
And about that "we have an UNBROKEN line of succession" part? Tell me, does that line allow for intermittent breaks???
Hang around a few hours and daniel1212 will probably post his research showing how small a percent of the Bible is read or taught in a year of mass attendance.
And that is the claim here. Much of the mass is repeated every time at the expense of exposing Romans to the rest of scripture.
Depends on the Mass...pre V2 or post V2.
So, ebb, who was the last valid pope?
I don’t recall that anyone ever got an answer for that question.
I will, of course, allow this to be your call...
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