Read the Last Paragraph.

Read the last paragraph in this article. It is very important in what it signals.

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/4897/the_washington_post_explains_pope_francis_to_us.aspx


Sojourns with Schall
The Washington Post "explains" Pope Francis to us
July 05, 2016 12:40 EST
James V. Schall, S.J.


Pope Francis arrives to lead his general audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican in this May 11 file photo. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)


On July 2, 2016, the Washington Post carried an interesting Editorial entitled, “The Pope’s Welcome Surprises”. The Editorial is short and can be read in a few minutes, and what follows presupposes acquaintance with the Post Editorial itself. That this Editorial is written is not a particularly great “surprise”. It reveals, in my opinion, just how responsible non-Catholic observers understand what the Holy Father has been saying and doing. Whether they have him exactly right can and should be debated.

What follows here is one man’s “reading” or “re-reading” of what is said and implied in this Post Editorial. This “re-reading” and “re-writing” is not a parody or a critique of what the Post wrote or what the Holy Father may hold. It is putting in my own words what can fairly be taken to be what at least some of the public hear the Pope saying. Others may see it differently, but I think what follows comes close to what is implied in the Editorial:

“The Pope Surprises the World”

Under Pope Francis, the Catholic Church now, in principle, accepts the liberal/humanist concepts of modern morality and justice. This view emphasizes state authority (positive law), unlimited moral freedom, theoretic relativism, and universal tolerance.
Francis has not yet formally managed infallibly to install these principles--such as the feasible goodness of divorce, the gay life, abortion, and the denial of any dogmatism or rigidity. He is a severe critic of inequality in all forms, a champion of the downtrodden. He approves ecology’s concern with earth’s dwindling resources. He is systematically working his way through these issues and will, no doubt, soon define these concepts in formal ecclesial terms.

This ‘Francis’ revolution in the Catholic Church is unexpected but welcome. It is long overdue. The old order of doctrine, tradition, and unchangeable moral principles can gradually be set aside. This new freedom and scientific understanding of the Catholic Church are what we now witness in the memorable words of this Argentine pope. They come from the last place from whence we might expect the long-awaited modernization of this venerable but stubborn institution.

Again, this is how one man reads the minds that composed the Post’s Editorial. I take it to be a fair interpretation. As such Editorials on the intentions of Pope Francis multiply in the world press, it seems to be up to the Holy Father to clarify himself for the benefit of everyone. Because of the high profile of this Post Editorial, I do not think ‘the Vatican’ bureaucracy can any longer perform this clarifying task. In this sense, the Editorial is welcome as a basis of deep reflection about the nature of the Church.

About the Author



James V. Schall, S.J.

James V. Schall, S.J. taught political philosophy at Georgetown University for many years until recently retiring. He is the author of numerous books and countless essays on philosophy, theology, education, morality, and other topics. His most recent book is Reasonable Pleasures: The Strange Coherences of Catholicism (Ignatius Press). Visit his site, "Another Sort of Learning", for more about his writings and work.

 

It is as the Father/Professor points out about the perception the world's media has of what the Holy Father is saying. That this perception is deeply different from Catholic teaching and that the Holy Father , himself, personally, needs to clarify matters by reaffirming those Teachings.

There is a very,very good article in the , 'Catholic Herald which certainly could not be called a, 'Pope Beater', by any means:

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/july-22nd-2016/liberal-catholicisms-unexpected-crisis/

 

the Washington Post is a left leaning publication and the media and powers that be will feed us like blind sheep if we allow it....I have seen nothing change in church doctrine thus far with Francis....this is a great deal of hooey....

 

I do not believe, Donna, that any Pope can change Church Doctrine , as that would go against the teachings on Papal Infallibilty and would itself be a heresy. I would imagine there would be only a handful of people who would suggest such a thing.

What is being suggested is that the Holy Father, while not changed actual Church Doctrine, through the front door, so to speak , may be doing it through the back door of allowing it to occur in Pastrol Practise. So changing things whilst not changing them, if you see what I mean.

 

I don't think Pope Fracnis is an anit Pope. He was clearly elected by the Cardinals.

I am still a Catholic and the Pope is the Pope. I don't think he is an abomination
.

So I am glad we agree on all that John.

 

It is possible to ask questions about the words and actions of a Pope and not be dragged of to hell by a pack of howling demons, or exploding in a puff of greasy black smoke. Look!! I do it and am still here.

 

If someone asked me if the Pope was, 'Bad', I think I would hesitate. I would hesitate if I was asked if anyone was, 'Bad' . It is a very serious question. Then again there are questions of Charity. I am not sure if I would place him in a box and call him, 'Bad'. I don't think he is actively planning to hurt the Church. I think he honestly believes that what he is doing is helping the Church.

He is Pope and I have always tried to give him leeway. I heard a Liberal Redemptorist priest in Clonard describe him as the greatest Pope in history and the best thing that ever happened to the Church. I can see where a Liberal would think so. He is entilled to his opinion.

I would consider Francis , without doubt, far and away the very worst Pope in the history of the Church. Far, far worse than say, Pope Alexander the Borgia Pope, for instance who was after all only interested in power and money. Our Present Pope is interested in bad ideas which is a million time worse then the Borgias ever were.
He utterly appalls me and I suppose will continue to utterly appal me till his reign is over.

Hopefully the next Pope will try to set matters straight, but I think it will take generations to undo the huge harm of the Pontificate.

Still Our Lady has promised us vicotry at the end of all this smoke and darkness. So hopefully one day Pope Francis and his creww will only be a nasty memory.

 

Folks need to be disabused of this false notion; the Church has NEVER taught that a pope CANNOT be guilty of heresy. In fact, quite the opposite. The Church has mused about and talked about such a possibility for centuries, She just isn't sure what would happen if a pope is a heretic:


http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/can-pope-heretic
Can a Pope Be a Heretic?
Excerpt:

Since believing something wrong doesn’t automatically make you culpable for the sin or guilty of the crime, theologians usually make a distinction between people who aren’t consciously and deliberately rejecting the Church’s teaching and those who are:

• A material heretic is someone who does notrealize that they believe something heretical. Provided that their ignorance is not their own fault, material heretics are neither culpable of the sin nor guilty of the crime.

• A formal hereticis someone who does realize that they believe something heretical and makes a conscious and free decision to believe it. Formal heretics are culpable for the sin, and can also be penalized of the crime provided that they meet the appropriate conditions (age, awareness, etc.).

Can the pope be a heretic?Most theologians would agree that a pope could be a material heretic, just like any other well-meaning but misinformed Catholic. He wouldn’t be culpable for any sin or guilty of any crime. He could, in fact, remain in a state of grace, and, endowed with the virtue of faith, lead the Christian faithful in the faith delivered once for all to the apostles. His material heresy might even appear in his non-infallible teaching, although God gives him special help to avoid that (CCC 892). But Catholics firmly believe that it could never appear in his infallible teaching. (CCC 891)

Theologians are divided as to whether the pope could ever be a formal heretic, because they don’t agree on two things:

1. Does the grace promised by Christ to Peter preclude the possibility of a pope falling into formal heresy?

1. If it doesn’t, would a heretical pope lose his office as a consequence of the sin of heresy, or as a penalty for the crime of heresy?

There were always some people who believed that God would simply not allow the pope to become a formal heretic, because it would be against Christ’s promises to Peter. But from the twelfth century onwards, a lot of Catholic theologians didn’t. That’s when Gratian, the most important medieval canon lawyer, included in his Decretum a warning to errant popes that he attributed to St. Boniface:

If the Pope, remiss in his duties and neglectful of his and his neighbor’s salvation, gets caught up in idle business, and if moreover, by his silence (which actually does more harm to himself and everyone else), he nonetheless leads innumerable hoards of people away from the good with him, he will be beaten for eternity with many blows alongside that very first slave of hell [the Devil]. However, no person can presume to convict him of any transgressions in this matter, because, although the Pope can judge everyone else, no one may judge him, unless he, for whose perpetual stability all the faithful pray as earnestly as they call to mind the fact that, after God, their own salvation depends on his soundness, is found to have strayed from the faith. (Decretum, Part 1, Distinction 40, Chapter 6)​

So, no one can convict a pope of being remiss in his duties, because no one stands above the pope in judgment—unless the pope is a heretic, and then… Then what? Unfortunately, Gratian didn’t fill in the blank. But since Gratian’s Decretum became required reading for theologians and canon lawyers, the question became unavoidable for subsequent generations of Catholic theology.

The two most important answers came from sixteenth-seventeenth century Jesuits: Francisco Suarez and St. Robert Bellarmine.

Suarez took it as a given that a pope could be a formal heretic. He then considered two possibilities for what happens next:

First possibility: The pope loses his office as a consequence of the sin of heresy, because people who commit that sin cease to be members of the Church, and God deposes a pope who is no longer a member of the Church. (Suarez, De fide, 10.6.2)​

Suarez rejects this possibility for two reasons. First, falling out of a state of grace might mean that you aren’t a member of the Church in the way that you’re supposed to be, but it doesn’t mean that you’re not a member of the Church—otherwise you’d be kicked out of the Church every time you committed a mortal sin. Second, if Catholics are supposed to believe that God deposes popes, then Scripture, the Tradition of the Church, and the pronouncements of the Magisterium ought to have said something about it—but they haven’t. Besides, if God deposes popes, you could never be sure if the pope was really the pope—what if he was a secret heretic and God had secretly deposed him? How would you ever know? (Suarez, De fide, 10.6.2-4)

Second possibility: The pope keeps his office if he commits the sin of heresy, but loses his office if he is convicted of the crime of heresy. (De fide 10.6.6)​

Suarez thinks that, just like Christ bestows the papacy on the man whom the Church elects, so also Christ takes away the papacy from the man whom the Church convicts (De fide 10.6.10). So, if a pope commits the sin of heresy, all the other bishops of the world have the right to try him for the crime of heresy, even against his will (De fide 10.6.7). If they were to convict him, he could be considered deposed from the papacy by Christ, and the Church could elect another pope.

Bellarmine was more hesitant about the whole question. Unlike Suarez, he did not take it as a given that the pope could be a formal heretic. Actually, Bellarmine considered it “probable” that God would prevent the pope from ever being a formal heretic (he says it twice: De Romano Pontifice 2.30 and 4.2). Nevertheless, Bellarmine was willing to consider what would be the case if the pope could fall into formal heresy.

If we assume that the pope could be a formal heretic, Bellarmine thinks Suarez’s opinion is wrong. Suarez allows the bishops to judge the pope. But one of Gratian’s basic rules is that no one can judge the pope. Sure, Suarez has Christ carrying out the judgment, but it is only because the other bishops of the Church have pronounced the judgment first.

Instead, Bellarmine adopts the position that Suarez rejected: the pope loses his office immediately by committing the sin of formal heresy, because people who commit that sin cease to be members of the Church, and God deposes a pope who is no longer a member of the Church. It’s true that the bishops could still get together and make a declaration that God had deposed the pope, but their declaration would not be a judgment in any real sense, only an acknowledgement of what God had already done. (De Romano Pontifice 2.30)

*****


The actual teaching of the Church is that no pope has ever been shown to be a manifest or formal heretic. It is not the teaching of the Church that no pope has ever been a material heretic, nor that a pope could never commit manifest or formal heresy.

It has not happened historically, but from that one may NOT conclude that it may never happen.

Because it could happen in the future (but has not happened in the past), theologians have debated the subject for centuries, and still do not have a definite answer of how God and the Church will handle it. But to claim it cannot happen in the future is NOT a teaching of the Church.

 

This debate is about whether those in irregular unions (by definition living in adultery, fornication, or sodomy, in other words living lives in objectively mortal sin) may be admitted to Holy Eucharist.

Kasper (a known liberal dissenter who was disciplined and silence by SAINT Pope JPII and Cardinal Ratzinger for promoting this position) was rehabilitated by this pope from his first Wednesday audience of his pontificate, and was made keynote speaker at the meeting of Cardinals where Holy Eucharist for those in irregular unions was first placed on the agenda. The pope then praised him for his serene theology, doing "theology on one's knees."

Scalfari said the pope told him eventually everyone who asks will be admitted to the Eucharist.

His childhood friend visited with him and reported the pope's two goals for his pontificate were admitting those in irregular unions to the Eucharist, and ending priestly celibacy.

This pope phoned a woman living in an irregular union who had been instructed not to present herself for Holy Eucharist that "a little bread and wine" never hurt anybody, and to just go to another priest. The same story was repeated with his childhood friend's coworker in Argentina.

The conference of bishops of the Philipines said this groundbreaking document must immediately be placed into pastoral practice; theologians in Europe claim catechisms and other Church teaching documents must be edited to reflect this new thinking in AL.

Archbishop Forte claimed that the pope told him: “If we speak explicitly about communion for the divorced and remarried, you do not know what a terrible mess we will make. So we won’t speak plainly, do it in a way that the premises are there, then I will draw out the conclusions.”

Cardinal Schonborn has been admitting those in irregular marriage to the Eucharist for 15 years in his diocese. When asked how to interpret AL, the pope said to consult Schonborn's position, who agrees with and promotes this interpretation, and claims AL is magisterial and all preceding Church documents must be read in accord with it.

Now the Vatican newspaper itself (!!!) runs an editorial promoting and defending the interpretation of AL that would permit those in irregular unions to receive the Holy Eucharist.

This is plainly the pope's agenda, anyone arguing otherwise has zero credibility.

It's the worst kind of modern Pharisaicalism.

This is obviously a gross violation of Jesus's plain words of Scripture, and 2000 years of magisterial teaching.

It is heretical, scandalous and blasphemous.

No emotion laden appeals to situational ethics ("mercy") can make it otherwise.

 

The following Vatican document was published when Kasper publicly pushed this agenda in the early 1990s (in case anyone still holds the mistaken notion that this agenda can be squared with orthodoxy).

It was a direct response by Pope John Paul II, by way of Cardinal Ratzinger, to Kasper's promotion of these errors:

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...oc_14091994_rec-holy-comm-by-divorced_en.html

There's a good summary of the situation here:

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/n...doesnt-support-kasper-in-synod-debates-35882/

Excerpt:

The issue re-emerged in 1993, when Kasper, then Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, as well as two other German bishops, wrote a letter referring, according to Healy, to the teaching of Familiaris consortio as “a general norm that, while true, cannot regulate all of the very complex individual cases.”

The following year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a letter to bishops, reminding them that “if the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God's law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists.”

The letter, written by Cardinal Ratzinger and approved by St. John Paul II, moreover stated that “members of the faithful who live together as husband and wife with persons other than their legitimate spouses may not receive Holy Communion … pastors in their teaching must also remind the faithful entrusted to their care of this doctrine.”

Cardinal Ratzinger and his congregation followed up on that letter, which “was met with a very lively response,” by studying several of the more significant objections to it.

The cardinal's follow-up letter, published in 1998, noting that while varying from the “oikonomia” practice of the Eastern Orthodox and the opinions of a few among the Church Fathers, the practice of the Catholic Church “recovered … the original concept of the Church Fathers,” which prohibits a “more varied praxis” regarding Communion for the divorced and remarried.

Finally, after his election as Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger wrote Sacramentum caritatis, the concluding document of the 2005 Synod on the Eucharist, which noted that “where the nullity of the marriage bond is not declared and objective circumstances make it impossible to cease cohabitation, the Church encourages these members of the faithful to commit themselves to living their relationship in fidelity to the demands of God's law, as friends, as brother and sister; in this way they will be able to return to the table of the Eucharist, taking care to observe the Church's established and approved practice in this regard.”

 

I posted this link from Catholic Answers on another thread:

Honorius I, POPE (625—October 12, 638), a Campanian, consecrated October 27 (Duchesne) or November 3 (Jaffe, Mann), in succession to Boniface V. His chief notoriety has come to him from the fact that he was condemned as a heretic by the sixth general council (680).

http://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/pope-honorius-i

Reading the piece from Catholic Answers, I get the impression that Honorius was a nice, affable Pope who didn't want to step on anyone's toes. His problem was that some believers at the time held that Jesus had only one nature or "will" (His divine nature which incorporated his humanity) and they were in schism whereas the orthodox belief was in two distinct natures - divine and human. It isn't clear whether poor Honorius actually believed at that stage that Jesus did have two natures because he didn't have it in him to step up to the plate and say so clearly because a load of heretics were being brought back to the Church by a compromise wording. Honorius agreed to a compromise that they would avoid using the term "two wills" in a letter to Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople. After Honorius died, Sergius convened a synod that accepted the one will as truly agreeing with the Apostolic preaching. The letter from Honorius to Sergius caused an argument about whether it was a magisterial document carrying papal infallibility. Plenty of arguments on both sides culminating in the document being magisterial because it was a papal letter but not infallible because it didn't declare anything ex-cathedra.

No doubt folk more scholarly than me will read all sorts of nuances and different interpretations about poor Pope Honorius and Sergius who got most of the blame, but the bottom line for me was that he trusted a Bishop who sold him a fudged wording on an article of faith to bring lost sheep back to the fold. It has a familiar ring to it.

 

Good questions, for which I don't have all the answers. Prophecy says the true Church will appear to be so eclipsed as ceasing to exist.

The world insists that God is all "mercy" and "luv."

I suspect that many of us will soon learn that God is actually very incensed with mankind for its many sins, not in excusing away these sins by "accompaniment" and "mercy."

In his book ‘The Priest: His Dignity and Obligations’ St John Eudes wrote that God permits bad priests as a sign that He is thoroughly angry with His people. In Chapter 11, Qualities of a Priest St John Eudes writes:​

Bad priests are a sign of God’s anger​

‘THE MOST EVIDENT MARK of God’s anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clerics’ who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds.​

Instead of nourishing those committed to their care, they rend and devour them brutally. Instead of leading their people to God, they drag Christian souls into hell in their train. Instead of being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, they are its innocuous poison and its murky darkness.
​

God have mercy on the "simple un-theological lay person who understand the simple words of follow Peter" in this age. His Church will briefly seem defeated if he knows his Faith.