One of the things I often see repeated by saints is how eventually they come to a place where they only see themselves and God, both internally and externally. Such an amazing and pure world view. Such a contrast to today.
Good point, although they tended to see themselves as very small and recognised God's greatness. St. Teresa of Avila even saw herself as very wicked! While relying on God's goodness. I like St. Carlo Acutis who said, "Not me, but God!"
Very cool pattern. Another paradox, humility opens us to God whereas pride closes us off. First is last, last is first. God brings down princes and exhalts the lowly.
Vatican II, of which this Pope is a very strong advocate if the recent address by the US papal nuncio to the US bishops is anything to go by (cf yesterday’s Catholic Thing essay by Robert Royal), explicitly states that a pope should not use his papal authority in matters in which he lacks any and has no expertise. Reading Robert Royal’s article, one could easily interpret current Vatican policy as asserting that Vatican II is a new revelation, complete with prophetic power (due to an inability to distinguish it from mere hindsight), and that it supercedes two millennia of Church history.
I notice Papa Leo met a group of Hollywood stars and said about how awful it was that cinemas were failing. So everything went well, smiles all around. Wonderful I wonder what would have happened if he had called them out for their pornography, violence and pushing of LGBTQ, transgender, the Occult and all things Woke? There might have been fewer smiles. But why does he feel the need to meet such people? Perhaps because he regards them as fellow travellers?
I haven’t the patience to watch videos! Is Pope Leo basing his appropriateness to deploy his papal authority on these matters upon the prophecy of Our Lady at Akita?
I am having trouble accessing The Catholic Thing website right now, from Canada. Is anybody else noticing this? Apparently the Cloudflare site is down, and it affects a lot of other websites, including AI programs. Essentially Cloudflare is a security company that checks to see if a url is "safe," (but according to whom?) This makes me uneasy. The Cloudflare filter may be up and working soon, but will it flag me, and others, as a security threat due to my beliefs and browsing history? EDIT: all is well now, but was worrying at the time.
We know what Revelation is; it is a simple concept. I think most would agree that it is the direct Divine presentation of knowledge to men of things otherwise unknowable. But, what is Tradition? It is a concept that is held in contempt by modernists. How do they see it? Firstly, they are temporal provincialists who perceive that people of other times were not as intelligent or in-the-know as they are. Indeed, like many of the original ‘protestants’ before them, they regard those who preceded them as wicked and superstitious, whereas, in gnostic fashion, it is they who claim to have the real truth. In contrast to this narrow, gnostic view of Tradition, is it not a much more concrete thing? Our Lord ministered on Earth for three years, in what was mostly an oral society. It would be naive, and surely untrue, to conclude that He only said what is written in the Gospels in all that time. He must have said far, far more-St John the Evangelists alludes to this when he says that there weren’t enough books in the world to contain it all. I’ve read that, since the advent of the printing press and the consequent growth of literacy, men’s abilities to remember have greatly declined. The skills of memory were themselves a tradition that has been neglected and largely forgotten. Yet, in Christ’s time the great majority of people were illiterate and anthropologists have accumulated a good body of evidence that information was readily and accurately handed on via the oral route. This is the basic definition of tradition. It has nothing to do with ‘superstition’ or ‘myth’. People had skills to preserve what they were told, not to exaggerate, distort or even invent information. Society and civilisation depended on it. Otherwise, how could people have continued to bake bread or ferment wine? We can look it up in a book, if we forget (God help us if we lose our books). Most people in the ancient times hadn’t that option, so adequate memory was imperative. The same principles applied to the extraordinary events of Our Lord’s lifetime. Even the Gospels, a short written summary of the essentials, were not written for some years after these events. Perhaps, it was only the threat of martyrdom of those possessing the knowledge of events that made it necessary to write the accounts down? At any rate, the oral skills of the people of the time could be relied upon to preserve that knowledge passed on from the Apostles, which was not included in the Gospels and which is now regarded as the Tradition. Fortunately, or more truly by the Grace of God, much of this Tradition was finally written down by the earlier and later Church Fathers for the benefit of our amnemonic generations. Sadly, there is a strong suspicion that Pope Leo, with his illogical threats of ‘changing attitudes’, as a prelude to the impossible feat of ‘changing doctrine’, is a member of this gnostic caste. Gnosticism, Protestantism, Modernism. All movements of people who think they know better than everyone and anyone else. Nothing is new under the sun. The Reality is that everyone is under the Son.
Your last sentence sums it all up perfectly. We are all under the Son and His Mercy. Unless we choose differently. And even then we would be under the Son and His Justice. A terrifying thing to contemplate. These later years have shown me at last what I could never comprehend when I was young--well I grasped it intellectually but now I literally see it working in our world--and that is satanic pride. It is everywhere. In science in education in government and even may God have mercy in the one true Holy Catholic Church. We are truly approaching as a world "The Valley of Decision". To quote the Angel of Fatima " Pray pray pray!!!"
Pride, as you put it so well, explains it all. We are ruled by people in every walk of life with irrepressible self-regard, an arrogant belief in their own merits, no matter the abundance of evidence to the contrary. They are all, in their own fields, blindly leading us to inevitable catastrophe, most of them utterly convinced that they are creating an utopia.
I am feeling uneasy about this post…it seems like detraction unless I clarify it. I expect that media is slanting our perceptions toward suspicion. I don’t know the actual truth about our Pontiff’s intentions in this specific situation, nor of how this event was set up (ie, to further an agenda.) Mea Culpa, folks. My remarks about Hollywood still stand.
I finished reading the entire apostolic letter of Pope Leo, and I can say that it contains a firm defense of the Divinity of Christ, as well as an implicit reference to the Orthodox doctrine of Theosis, while at the same time rejecting Masonic self-deification. The only concerning part, to be completely honest, is the appeal to set aside certain theological controversies that prevent a common prayer of Christendom to the Holy Spirit, because Protestants obviously do not accept that the Eucharist is the renewal of Christ’s Sacrifice; they naturally consider that to be blasphemous.
