But if you want to go on thinking to yourself about how wonderful you think he maybe he is , please go on doing so. I'll not Argue against it. In many ways it is a really wonderful place to be. I kinda wish I was there with you. Peace and light and everything worked out in the end. Wonderful. What's Not to like? But I will warn you in the future worms of doubt will creep in. You are in for a very,very,,very steep uphill road in all this. However, whatever. As you wish. I am glad you are happy. At least for the time being. I suppose it does no harm. In many ways I am very jealous of you.
I don't understand how genuine criticism is somehow putting the Pope under the microscope. Also, our personal lives are a lot different than the actions made via the office of Pope. Muslims and Jews say and do whatever they wish these days, but for some reason we as Catholics have to bend to the globalists. It is very clear to me that promoting someone who is scandalous in the management of their current office to the office of Archbishop, someone that aligns with globalist policies, isn't a good fruit. AB Mackinlay literally installed a pagan statue in a Cathedral. Is this not concerning? Is this not idolatry? Is this not spiritual warfare? And for this, he gets a promotion. Even the "artist" made an occult reference in describing the inspiration for the "work" on their website. It looks similar to the blue painted guy at the Olympic ceremony last year. https://www.change.org/p/remove-transcendence-sculpture-from-sacred-heart-cathedral-bendigo
If only God knows, then why did God gift us with a brain? Does He not expect us to use it? Since when was being a Catholic meant that we are not supposed to ask honest, sincere questions, even about a Pope? Answer me honestly. Do you think it was a good or bad thing that his very first appointment as a Bishop to 700,000 Catholics supports same sex blessings, wants women deacons, had a nude statue of a couple in his Cathedral and supports the synod on synodality? Do I have to be God to think that this is very bad? A good thing or a bad thing? Answer me honestly.
No one is claiming to know the Mind of God or what Pope Leo's future will be. Everyone hopes he will be the greatest of all Popes. But for the time being he has made some really bad choices. We can't simply look past this, especially in light of the last Papacy. If these bad choices become a theme, then we know where we stand. The other thing is that the silence is stunning in regards to fiducis supplicans and the current suppression of the TLM. These aren't hard things to clarify and yet it is not being done.
Of course. I’m not sparring with you or anyone who uses that brain excuse. I’m pretty much out of the discussion. I’ll just keep praying. That’s essentially what Our Lady is asking us to do.
I don't have to be God to know when something smells bad and say so. Same sex blessings of couples is an abomination. I Know I am not God. But it is an abomination. A Pope who selects as his first appointment as Archbishop someone who supports such a thing is equally abominable. I don't need a microscope to see it or say it. It's just plain wrong. Wicked, Evil, Abominable. If you want to find some excuse for it like saying I am using a microscope , go ahead and do so. But even my dog, on a good day, could tell you this is wicked.
I don't believe God wants us to go brain dead over all these issues, however uncomfortable using our brains concerning them may make us, personally, feel. If we feel something is wrong and wicked there is not the least bit of harm in saying so. Appointing as his first Bishop as Pope, someone who supports same sex couple blessings and women deacons is totally horrible. If it causes you to feel faint that I say so, get yourself set. It's not going to be the last time I will say something about the guy that makes you feel dizzy and crumple up in a heap. I will , I suspect, have a whole lot more to say in the future about what I strongly suspect are totally despicable goings on in the future.
One of the chief criticisms of we Catholics since the Protestant Rebellion was that we are Papists or Pope Heads. That we stop using our brains and let Popes be our brains for us. That in effect Popes become our Idols. For any Catholics who really understood their Faith , this was never the case. I think St Cardinal John Henry Newman was the guy who expressed this best in modern times: 'I will drink to the Pope, but my conscience first'. https://firstthings.com/toasting-the-conscience/ Toasting the Conscience James Conley October 22, 2015 Share Article In Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Blessed John Henry Newman suggests gamely that religion should never be the subject matter for after-dinner social toasts. But, he says “if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.” Newman promised to drink to conscience before the pope because he believed resolutely in the primacy of conscience. Newman understood that the conscience imposes an obligation—that personal integrity dictates a fundamental human duty to hear the interior voice of our conscience, and to follow its demands. The primacy of conscience has become a matter of discussion at the Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family, now taking place in Rome. At issue is what believers should do when the conscience seems to suggest a deviance from Catholic doctrine, and how pastors, and bishops, should respond. This question is especially relevant to the debates regarding the reception of the Eucharist by Catholics divorced and remarried, and regarding the proper pastoral care of Catholics in same-sex relationships. Newman believed that modernity had stopped listening to the real voice of conscience; instead citing the conscience to validate libertine choices. He said that a true sense of conscience had been “superseded by a counterfeit,” in order to assert the “right of self-will.” When his contemporaries spoke of the conscience, Newman said that “they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all . . . [Conscience] becomes a license to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again.” Newman’s time is not much different from our own. And the “counterfeit” conscience seems today to have taken lodging among faithful believers, who are comfortable explaining that their integrity demands they reject the teachings of the Church. Today, in the life of the Church, many believers claim that their conscience contravenes the Gospel. That the conscience demands they use or prescribe contraceptives. Or ignore the obligations of matrimonial indissolubility. Or indulge disordered sexual inclinations. But the conscience can never enjoin a person to act contrary to divine precept. In fact, the conscience is, as Newman wrote, “the voice of God,” a channel of divine communication, “the aboriginal vicar of Christ.” Newman understood that the conscience reveals the law of God—that it is a “prophet,” preparing the soul in the way of the Lord. Newman also understood that pastors have an obligation to help the faithful hear the conscience, understand its voice, and respond to it. The conscience, Newman understood, is not easy to hear. Its voice, he wrote “may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each.” And he knew that hearing the conscience requires holiness, and serious guidance. Newman counseled that the man earnestly seeking to hear the conscience “must vanquish that mean, ungenerous, selfish, vulgar spirit of his nature, which, at the very first rumour of a command, places itself in opposition to the Superior who gives it, asks itself whether he is not exceeding his right, and rejoices, in a moral and practical matter to commence with skepticism. He must have no willful determination to exercise a right of thinking, saying, doing just what he pleases, the question of truth and falsehood . . . being simply discarded.” The task of pastors, as he understood, was to help their flocks in the task of self-examination, and true discernment. The task of pastors is to help the faithful understand that conscience can never contradict truth. Pastoral guidance of that sort might seem severe, but, for Newman, it was wholly necessary. In Newman’s view, validating a false sense of the conscience would be a kind of pastoral negligence; it would rob the believer an opportunity to hear the voice of God. Unfortunately, the synod’s discussions reveal that a counterfeit sense of the conscience seems to inform the view of some ecclesial leaders, who feel they must support decisions made “in conscience,” even when those decisions contravene revealed truth. This is nothing new. In the aftermath of Humana Vitae, pastoral support for the “counterfeit conscience” ran rampant. But the consequence of suppressing and ignoring the voice of God—the authentic conscience—is borne out in the empty pews and dwindling seminaries in the places where “conscientious dissent” was most rampant. Today, at the synod, the Church discusses wholesale endorsement of the counterfeit conscience. Such endorsement would be disastrous—most especially for those who would be taught by their pastors to ignore the saving power of divine precept. A Catholic who believes that conscience might really abrogate the Gospel has abandoned belief in the normativity of divine law, and its contribution to human flourishing. And a pastor who fails to instruct a misguided conscience seems to have forgotten that appeals to false conscience will offer no protection in the final judgment. Of course, the process of forming the conscience takes time. A person who begins in opposition to the Gospel may well find himself becoming gratefully obedient. And pastors should assist with the process of discernment, however long it takes. But pastors should also be clear—certain decisions really can render a Catholic outside the bounds of ecclesial communion, with the implications that entails. Our decisions—even made with appeals to an unformed conscience— always have consequences in this life, and consequences in the next. “Obedience to conscience leads to obedience to the Gospel,” Newman wrote, “which, instead of being something different altogether, is but the completion and perfection of that religion which natural conscience teaches.” The conscience is a gift, and a grace. Like Newman, before toasting anyone else, we should drink to that gift—and then we should help believers to hear the “still, small, voice,” of the Lord in our hearts.
Just this wonderful benediction was 1000 times better than what his predecessor was able to do for the last several years. How long had it been since a Pope participated in the Corpus Christi procession and benediction?
Agree. I thought it was very holy. I was amazed at the huge number of people receiving blessings and graces.
You are quick on the draw, Padraig. To tell you the truth, when Padre Pio threw someone out of the confessional, only then could I be truly confident of the state of that individual's soul. Disappointment, concern, and even horror are within my purview, but I won't touch judgment with a 10 ft. pole! No way! This does not mean I'm afraid to call someone out due to wicked behavior, but... The only situation that I will definitively reconsider is when I enter the confessional with mortal sin on my soul because I know my culpability.
I wish to put it on the record that, on the present evidence, I disagree with your views, Padraig. The biggest criticism I could conjure for myself against Pope Leo, so far, is that he might be too weak and timid to take on that huge section of the official Church that is homosexual and which has managed to inveigle itself into positions of great power. As seems evident from what happened to Cardinal Pell, not just in the false charges laid against him, but in the manner of his death, and the aftermath, there are psychopaths in power in The Church who will stop at nothing to get their way. I'm still hoping that Pope Leo is a man who is 'gentle as a dove', but 'cunning as a snake', as he needs to be. There is also the tactic that one ought keep one's enemies inside the tent, urinating out. In other words, is a man more dangerous as a bishop, who might have to accept authority whether he likes it or not, or as a disgruntled free agent, carrying on like the infamous Jame Martin SJ? I continue to hope for the best and expect the worst, but I will not bid the devil 'good day' until I meet him, as the old saying goes. God save all here.
Which precise prophecy? Bear in mind that the Catholic Church has always considered that no prophecy after the death of the last Apostle carries authority. No Catholic is compelled to believe it, even if it is Church-approved and so treasured as those of Our Lady of Fatima. I do choose to give high regard to Church-approved prophesy, on the grounds that it has been approven, but I would be very grateful to be shown where in this limited body of prophesy there is justification for your views? I do not consider that we can make definitive judgements merely on the basis of approved, post-Johannic prophesy, without at least being aware of concrete, irrefutible evidence, of which we were provided an abundance by Pope Francis. Indeed, one needed no prophesies to see the wrongs, in his case.
Bear in mind that the Catholic Church has always considered that no prophecy after the death of the last Apostle carries authority. No Catholic is compelled to believe it, even if it is Church-approved and so treasured as those of Our Lady of Fatima. From DeGaulle's previous post This is an important point!
