I see what hes saying...but he can't say things like that without explanations :(

Discussion in 'Scriptural Thoughts' started by fallen saint, May 11, 2019.

  1. fallen saint

    fallen saint Baby steps :)

  2. Dolours

    Dolours Guest

    That's an old story. Here's John Allen's attempt at whitewashing it: https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2...n-interview-pope-interview-this-time-on-hell/

    The official line about how the pair struck up a relationship is that Pope Francis wrote a reply to an article published by Scalfari and the series of interviews followed. We know now that the interviews gave Pope Francis plausible deniability while he used them as a weather balloon to see how much push-back he would get on his agenda for the Church. Getting very little pushback, he went ahead and implemented the agenda. While the official line about how the relationship began might well be true (the Pope did, in fact, respond to a piece written by Scalfari), it's also possible that the pair may have been known to each other with Cardinal Martini of St. Gallen Mafia fame being the link.

    As to the Pope telling Scalfari that Hell will be abolished and a new species introduced by God, that's quite possible if, like many Jesuits and other modernists, the Pope is a devotee of Teilhard deChardin (and I believe he is). DeChardin's work wasn't endorsed by the Holy Office (the CDF) but was never abandoned by the modernists and is getting a renaissance under Pope Francis. One of the reasons the Church disapproved of deChardin was that there was no place for Hell in his vision of the afterlife. While I know very little about deChardin or what he wrote, from the little I did read I couldn't get out of my head that old horror movie "The Blob", with God being a blob of love swallowing up everything in its path and leaving no space for the existence of anything other than the love blob. A Blob of Love wouldn't be such a bad thing, but it kind of contradicts what Jesus said and what the Church has always taught about everlasting pain for the condemned. God being outside time, and presumably when the earth is renewed there won't be time as we know it, perhaps those who believe that Hell will be abolished envisage eternity to be some kind of forever "now" and can fit the separation from God (the primary punishment of damnation) into that "now" without Hell being an actual place and Satan an actual being who suffers forever (as the Superior General of the Jesuits has said). It's very possible that Pope Francis was relating to Scalfari his own understanding of Teilhard deChardin's vision of what eternity will be and Scalfari accurately reported what he, in turn, understood of the Pope's version of it.

    Maybe we'd all be better off not having Pope Francis clarify what he told Scalfari. This could be one of those times when ignorance is bliss.

    I need to stress here that, of course, deChardin didn't describe God as a blob. That was just my imagination working overtime when I was reading about him.
     
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  3. Don_D

    Don_D ¡Viva Cristo Rey!

    Dr Peter Kwasniewski wrote and excellent article pertaining to this exact topic on 1P5 some time ago. It was recently republished in the magazine The Latin Mass. It is much too long to post here but it is definitely worth a read and helps one to understand why it is that Pope Francis says these things precisely without explaining them to be better understood. Dr Kwasniewski has written several articles for 1P5 that are excellent reading.

    https://onepeterfive.com/author/pkwasniewski/

    https://onepeterfive.com/teilhard-chardin-ambiguity-pope/

    Teilhard de Chardin: Model of Ambiguity for a Future Pope

    To a degree not yet as widely recognized as it should be, Pope Francis – Jorge Bergoglio, S.J. – is showing himself to be an admirable disciple of his Jesuit forerunner Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955), the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, who exercised an enormous influence on the young Jesuit Turks of the twentieth century. Gerard M. Verschuuren, in his new book The Myth of an Anti-Science Church: Galileo, Darwin, Teilhard, Hawking, Dawkinsjust released by Angelico Press, and worth reading for many reasons, but above all, because of the superbly written chapter on this controversial figure – tells us:

    His greatest stature was reached when he became almost an oracle and icon to many of what a twentieth-century Jesuit should be. Teilhard had become their role model. In spite of ecclesiastical admonitions regarding Teilhard-the-Ideologue, his ideas kept spreading in the Society of Jesus. Not only has his way of thinking infiltrated – or infected, according to some – the thinking of Jesuits, but it would also become a major element of thinking in other Catholic groups. Many Jesuits and other theologians have adopted Teilhard’s evolutionary approach[.] (118)

    I will assume, for the purposes of this article, that the reader has a basic sense of who Teilhard was: a scientist who contributed to a number of interesting (if not always above board) scientific enterprises and a writer of ponderous poetico-theologico-scientific tomes such as The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu that were roundly mocked by scientists and, on account of their palpable pantheism, landed him in deep trouble with his then conservatively-headed Jesuit order as well as with the Holy Office of the Inquisition (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).


    In what follows, I am more interested in pointing out the striking parallels that emerge between him and his confrere, Bergoglio.

    Verschuuren assembles an impressive series of quotations from across Teilhard’s whole career to show that he was, indeed, a card-carrying Modernist who perfectly fit the definition given by St. Pius X. First, let us consider how Modernism operates, according to Verschuuren (emphasis added):

    What Modernism basically does is to harness religious belief and practice to the cultural modes and whims of civilization in any given era by asserting that there is no permanent datum of faith, no dogma, and no fixed belief in Catholicism. This means that, due to new developments in society and science, the Church can deny in one age what she had affirmed in a previous age as essential dogma. Modernism is the preservation of the formulae of doctrine emptied of their meaning, in order to adapt the Faith of the Church to the alleged requirements of modern society.

    Not surprisingly, in the eyes of the Church, Modernism and Catholicism cannot possibly live in the same religious house. Catholicism acknowledges that what was true in Church doctrine yesterday cannot be false today, and what was immoral yesterday cannot be moral today. Modernists, in contrast, seem to have lost faith in their Faith and its orthodoxy; Charles Péguy called them people who no longer believe what they believe. Therefore, Modernism has been condemned by the Church on several occasions for trying to transform Catholicism from the inside.

    How strikingly the emphasized sentences describe the party in command of the Catholic Church today!

    For his part, Teilhard de Chardin manifested both sides of the Modernist. On the one hand, he wanted to “aggiornamentize” or update Christian doctrine until, ceasing to be what it had been historically, it essentially turned into modern thought. His preferred medium for the transition was evolutionary scientism. He believed not only that the evolution of species had already been adequately demonstrated, but also that evolution is the paradigm for grasping the whole of reality, including its spiritual aspects. He argued that matter evolves into spirit and that spirit will evolve into the cosmic Christ. The general framework is a Hegelian progressivism in which, in spite of momentary setbacks and conflicts, the whole universe, with mankind at its crest, is gradually improving, rising, and achieving spiritualization.

    As a result, Teilhard rejected the doctrine of the creation and fall of Adam and Eve and, more pointedly for the Holy Office, the doctrine of original sin, which he called “an absurdity.” For Teilhard, the first men (there were many of them) were prehistoric primates of weak intelligence, and the “fall” simply describes the alienation from God of insufficiently spiritualized beings. Thus, there is no place whatsoever for the doctrine of a sin attaching to human nature by way of natural generation from Adam – in spite of the fact that this was taught as a de fide dogma by the Council of Trent.

    Teilhard’s views on polygenism and original sin were among those condemned in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis of 1950. Yet Teilhard’s reaction, while apparently submissive in the public forum, was fiercely contemptuous in private. He characterized Humani Generis in the following words: “A good psychoanalyst would see in it the clear traces of a specific religious perversion – the masochism and sadism of orthodoxy; the pleasure of swallowing, and making others swallow, the truth under its crudest and stupidest forms” [ii].

    On the other hand – and this is a crucial point for understanding the general ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today – Teilhard, like many Modernists before and after him, refused to leave the Catholic Church, no matter how “badly” he felt he was treated by it. For him, the goal was to ride out the waves as long as possible, to influence and infiltrate, to make disciples, plant seeds, and publish (or, in his case, arrange for posthumous publications, since for the final period of his life, he was under strictures). He really believed he had the mission of changing the Church from within. Although he no longer professed the Catholic Faith – he once said to Dietrich von Hildebrand that St. Augustine “had spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural” (!) – the idea of being an ex-Catholic, sitting on the outside of the institution, held no appeal for him. It was as if he thought that only the Catholic Church provided the infrastructure necessary for the transmission of a synthetic, worldwide philosophy.

    Thus, in a letter dated January 26, 1936, he wrote:

    What increasingly dominates my interest is the effort to establish within myself, and to diffuse around me, a new religion (let’s call it an improved Christianity if you like) whose personal God is no longer the great Neolithic landowner of times gone by, but the Soul of the world … as demanded by the cultural and religious stage we have now reached.

    In another letter about five years later, on March 21, 1941, he declared: “According to my own principles, I cannot fight against Christianity; I can only work inside it by trying to transform and convert it.” In response to a defrocked priest whom he refers to as “Fr. G.,” Teilhard wrote on October 4, 1950:

    Basically I consider – as you do – that the Church (like any living reality after a certain time) reaches a period of “mutation” or “necessary reformation” after two thousand years; it is unavoidable. Mankind is undergoing a mutation, how could Catholicism not do the same?

    His evolutionist-pantheistic-animistic point of view prompted him to admit: “I find I can’t but realize again (and even more profoundly) the size of the abyss which separates my religious vision of the World and the vision in the Exercises of Ignatius.” A Jesuit who can no longer embrace the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is not only not a Jesuit in reality; he is not even a Catholic. We are, accordingly, hardly surprised to read these words from 1934: “If by consequence of some internal upheaval, I came to lose successively my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, my faith in the Spirit, it seems to me that I should continue to believe in the World.”

    Teilhard de Chardin was a lifelong believer in Marxism. With typical flair, he announced in a letter of August 14, 1952: “The Christian God on high and the Marxist God of Progress are reconciled in Christ. … As I love to say, the synthesis of the Christian God (of the above) and the Marxist God (of the forward) – Behold! that is the only God whom henceforth we can adore in spirit and in truth.” No wonder, as Verschuuren notes, “Teilhard is the only Roman Catholic author whose works were put on public display with those of Marx and Lenin in Moscow’s Hall of Atheism.”

    Continued at the link...
     
  4. Dolours

    Dolours Guest

    There are similarities between deChardin's beliefs and those of Moses Hess.

    It seems to me that Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict were far too lenient with the modernists, trying to meet them half way rather than confronting them head on. They said a few nice things about Teilhard which are now being used to make him out as some kind of saint or prophet. Sometimes I wonder whether our hierarchy don't have enough trust in God. The hierarchy at the Council of Trent didn't hold back when defending the faith and Heaven rewarded them with the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparition which brought in as many if not more converts to the Church than were lost to the Reformers.

    Here's an example of how Teilhard deChardin is being promoted by the Vatican: http://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/teilhard-de-chardin-and-women
    That a Vatican approved news outlet would publish that about a priest leaves me scratching my head.

    Making a big deal about a priest having love affairs with a string of women being ok as long as there was no sexual intercourse belittles the priesthood. His love letters to some of those women have been published. I read that he had one woman promise to be true to him forever, similar to a marital vow. The woman, a divorcee, made the promise probably hoping that it would lead to a full sexual relationship. I think that she may have been Jewish. Anyway, he dumped her just before they were due to go on an overseas trip together and he brought another woman instead - a woman he could pass off as his assistant and nurse.

    Seems to me that he used women to feed his vanity, presenting himself to them as some kind of challenge and then dumping them when they got too clingy. Where I come from there are some choice words to describe men like him, none of which would be suitable for a Catholic forum. In olden days, cad or charlatan would have been a good description.

    He's a big hit with the Episcopal Church. They actually have a feast day dedicated to him. Probably explains why the modernists are promoting him. I know that we're all called to humility but the humility in some modernist Catholics looks remarkably like an inferiority complex..
     
  5. fallen saint

    fallen saint Baby steps :)

    "They said a few nice things about Teilhard which are now being used to make him out as some kind of saint or prophet. Sometimes I wonder whether our hierarchy don't have enough trust in God."


    I think some don't believe at all and others believe but joined the other team. :(
     
  6. Dolours

    Dolours Guest

    Spiritual but not religious seems to be the trend.

    That page from L'Osservatore Romano is part of a lecture given by a Chinese Jesuit to a conference on Teilhard held in Beijing in 2003. L'Osservatore Romano published it in 2015.

    A couple of questions spring to mind after reading it:

    Would you let any young woman in your care fall under the influence of such a priest?

    Would you promote him as a role model for any lad in your care?

    I wouldn't, and I wouldn't put any value on his opinions about God's plans for the universere or what the beatific vision will be like.

    I reckon that "eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor hath it entered into the heart of man what things God has prepared for those who love him" applies as much to Teilhard as the rest of us no matter how high up the Church's chain of command his cult following reaches.

    A lot of academics seem to believe that judgement day (if they believe in a judgement) will be a debate and the more eloquent they are the more convinced God will be that they deserve VIP treatment in Heaven.
     
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