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.
How can one reject Francis as a valid pope, which ET did again right in post 12 , as well as apparently Pope Paul VI - since he considers Nostra Aetate to be teaching (formal I assume) heresy (and not just Evangelli Gaudium by Francis) and states that a heretic cannot be a valid pope - and yet not be schismatic, though he repeatedly has refused to directly tell us who he considers the last validly elected pope (or last real pope).
I think some other RCs here are secret disciples also of an unknown last valid pope, who sound like a class of SSPV disciples who do not say so directly.
And as you well know but for others who do not, I am a former RC, now evangelical, who sees the RCC as the most manifest deformation of the NT church , with Catholic distinctives being unseen in the only inspired record of what the NT church believed, and thus would be considered lost by traditional RCs, though some modern ones censure me for not being part of sloppy ecumenism.
And while ET here has relegated Francis to being "Protestant," on the other side in the same (?) RCC are those who say such things as
If you think that the Holy Ghost made a mistake and there hasn’t been a valid Pope in Rome since the 1960s or since the resignation of Benedict XVI, you’re a Protestant.
If you would rather follow the teachings of one pompous cardinal rather than the successor to Peter, that doesn’t make you more Catholic than the Pope, it makes you a Protestant.
If you think the Holy Ghost has forsaken the Pope and now speaks through a pack of theology professors, the bishop of the SSPX which has no canonical standing, and some guy who writes for The Remnant, in defiance of the Holy Father, you’re a Protestant.
If you obey every Catholic teaching that meshes with Right-wing sensibility but assume that every teaching that meshes with the Left isn’t equally binding or vice versa, you’re a Protestant. Ditto if you think that aesthetics, important as they are, make a Mass invalid and that a Church who allows the Novus Ordo has committed an error. Same if you think that any scholar on earth, no matter how many times he’s read Saint Thomas, knows more about Church teaching than the Holy Ghost Who speaks through Peter’s successor. - http://www.patheos.com/blogs/steelmagnificat/2017/09/call-catholic-pope/#disqus_thread
Seems to me that it’s belief in the ritual being done correctly more than anything else. The priest can be the worst cretin in the world but he’s got the magic in him, so do the incantations in the right circumstance in the right attire on the right occasions and they’re good as gold no matter what. That’s why I’ve become to some extent suspicious of most strongly liturgical varieties of Christianity. Run down a list, they’re inevitably the ones gone off the rails the worst.
I don't think 'Protestant' is a denomination; but ProtestantISM has denominations.
Safely...
So far...
.
Say it all you want; he WAS baptized Catholic.
Can't undo THAT; can you!
I think it contains THESE words:
I just KNOW you like the book of James...
James 1:22-24
Be doers of the word, and not hearers only. Otherwise, you are deceiving yourselves. For anyone who hears the word but does not carry it out is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror, and after observing himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.
That's funny; for even I remember replying to your comment.
Call no man father...
Worry about yours.
Is this going to be applied in your life as well?
Oooops.
I think the goalposts just moved.
And a kitten dies every time...
So; you want to complain about something a Prot posted on another thread, but not allow any...
I see.
Sounds like a quote from Col. Nathan R. Jessep that failed to make it off the editting floor.
Hey Toad!
Tell him he's ugly!!
I disagree with that. This thread was about how a Protestant minister (?) questions whether Francis is Catholic. The fact that a Protestant questions this is why ebb couldn't post it as a Catholic Caucus. But, essentially, this thread was more about Francis than non-Catholics in general.
OOps!
They shifted back.
I used to think that way, till I became an ex Catholic. 😱🤪❄️👍
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