Is Pope Francis a Liberal Protestant?

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.

The seven great letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, written around the year 106 while on his way to Rome to be thrown to the beasts, take for granted the existence of local hierarchical churches, ruled by bishops who are assisted by priests and deacons. Ignatius, a living disciple of John the Apostle, writes that “Jesus Christ...is the will of the Father, just as the bishops, who have been appointed throughout the world, are the will of Jesus Christ. Let us be careful, then, if we would be submissive to God, not to oppose the bishop.”

Within each city there was a single church under a bishop, who in turn was assisted by priests in the spiritual realm and deacons in the administrative. The latter devoted themselves especially to alms-giving, and a striking feature of primitive Christianity is its organized benevolence.

These local churches were largely self-sufficient but would group around a mother church in the region — Antioch, Alexandria, Rome — and the bishops of each region would occasionally meet in councils. But they all considered themselves part of a universal Church — the Catholic Church, as Ignatius first called it — united in belief, ritual, and regulation.

Steelfish, your claims are unprovable. This does call your “credentials” of scholarship into greater doubt.

Writing in 1886, Dr. William P. Killen regarded all the Ignatian epistles, beginning with that to the Romans, as having been pseudepigraphically composed in the early 3rd century. His reasons included their episcopal emphasis, which is otherwise unknown before the reign of Callistus, the Bishop of Rome around 220.
Most scholars, however, accept at least the two Ignatian epistles which were referenced by Origen,[15] and believe that by the 5th century, this collection had been enlarged by spurious letters.
The original text of six of the seven authentic letters are found in the Codex Mediceo Laurentianus written in Greek in the 11th century (which also contains the pseudepigraphical letters of the Long Recension, except that to the Philippians),[16] while the letter to the Romans is found in the Codex Colbertinus.[6]
Some of the original letters were, at one point, believed to had been changed with interpolations.
The oldest is known as the "Long Recension" which dates from the latter part of the fourth century.[6] These were created to posthumously enlist Ignatius as an unwitting witness in theological disputes of that age, but that position was vigorously combated by several British and German critics, including the Catholics Denzinger and Hefele, who defended the genuineness of the entire seven epistles.[6]
At the same time, the purported eye-witness account of his martyrdom is also thought to be a forgery from around the same time.
A detailed but spurious account of Ignatius' arrest and his travails and martyrdom is the material of the Martyrium Ignatii which is presented as being an eyewitness account for the church of Antioch, and attributed to Ignatius' companions, Philo of Cilicia, deacon at Tarsus, and Rheus Agathopus, a Syrian.

quotes from Wiki

"But a most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision of men!"- John Calvin

Both men and writings of God are so regardless of what men say, and the NT church began with the common people correctly ascertaining both, in dissent from the magisterial stewards of Scripture.

As for Calvinism, he was right on some things, but like Luther there was some holdovers from Rome, as the work of reformation is not the work of one day or two. Calvin believed the sacrament of the Eucharist provided “undoubted assurance of eternal life to our minds, but also secures the immortality of our flesh,” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.17.32)

However, while Catholics and some others lift this out of context. Calvin is not speaking of the Catholic Eucharist:

The truth of God, therefore, in which I can safely rest, I here embrace without controversy. He declares that his flesh is the meat, his blood the drink, of my soul; I give my soul to him to be fed with such food. In his sacred Supper he bids me take, eat, and drink his body and blood under the symbols of bread and wine. I have no doubt that he will truly give and I receive. Only, I reject the absurdities which appear to be unworthy of the heavenly majesty of Christ, and are inconsistent with the reality of his human nature. ...

the corporeal presence which the nature of the sacrament requires, and which we say is here displayed in such power and efficacy, that it not only gives our minds undoubted assurance of eternal life, but also secures the immortality of our flesh, since it is now quickened by his immortal flesh, and in a manner shines in his immortality. Those who are carried beyond this with their hyperboles, do nothing more by their extravagancies than obscure the plain and simple truth....

Now by participation of the body, as we have explained, we nourish faith not less richly and abundantly than do those who drag Christ himself from heaven. - https://www.biblestudytools.com/history/calvin-institutes-christianity/book4/chapter-17.html

Rather than his own attempts to formulate this sort of Real Presence, or that of Catholicism, the Scriptural and simple meaning in the light of Scriptural teaching is that Christian have communion/fellowship with Christ and each other like as pagans had fellowship with demons by taking part in their dedicatory feasts.

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar?

What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing? But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils. (1 Corinthians 10:16-21)

Which fellowship in either case was by partaking of the real flesh and blood of the one in whose name the feast was done, but by signifying oneness with the object of worship and with each other.

Thus in the next chapter the Corinthians were guilty of coming together in order to take part in the Lord;s supper but really were not, since they were treating other members as if they were not, feasting independently while others were hungry, (1 Corinthians 11:17-22) while as Paul reminds them by repeating the words the Lord speak at the Last Supper, they were to do this communal feast in effectually (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:2) remembrance of Him who died for them, thereby showing/declaring "the Lord's death till He comes" by sharing food as one body for whom Christ died. (1 Corinthians 11:23-26) For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. (1 Corinthians 11:26)

Thus to presume they were having/taking part in the Lord's supper while acting utterly contrary to remembering the Lord who bought the church with His own sinless shed, blood (Acts 20:28) not recognize the body of Christ as consisting of those they ignored, was a damnable sin, resulting in Divine chastisement. (1 Corinthians 11:27-31)

Therefore the solution was to examine oneself, whether one's heart and conduct corresponded to effectually remembering the Lord for died for them, and which means loving others for whom Christ died (cf. Romans 14:15) as He did, and to not come hungry looking for food and thus give in to temptation to eat independent of others and to excess in this "feast of charity." (Jude 1:12)

Thus and more fully, taking part in the Lord's supper in remembrance of Him means showing His death for those purchased by it, that as one "bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6:20; 7:23) we are to seek to be in this world as He was, (cf. 1 John 4:17) and in particular seek to love His body the church as He did (and in examination repent of failing to do so), showing union with Christ and each other as brethren together taking part in a commemorative meal.

To do so contrary to that is worse than Communists taking part in a Thanksgiving meal. But how short do I come, especially in heart, of loving others as brethren (esp. some) as well others who are not.

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What part about obeying the bishops?