Fundamentalist Catholic can now be used as a convenient label to put down and marginalise those who hold fast to Church teachings and dogma in our increasingly intolerant and totalitarian society.
Yes we do have fundamentalists in our Church albeit at the fringe. You know who I mean. As soon as 'ist' is added to a word there is an agenda and hidden motives. Things supposedly done in the name of the truth are in reality done in the name of their truth. They are the divisive ones. I know this applies to me to some extent too as I am a Garabandalist but I never hide my motive which is to carry the messages given there. And I am subject to the final ruling of the Church. But I am not a fundamentalist Christian who condemns everyone else and refuses to bend or try to adapt within the parameters of truth as promulgated by the Church. Sometimes I really feel as if I am wasting my time here but just to let you know I am including Padraig and Aviso and Mac and Brian in my St Andrews Novena....every day from now to Christmas. While there is a place for "set your face like flint" there is also a place for "Flexe quod est rigidum."
Rather it is used to create a victim role by those who reject the word of our Pope, poor old Francisphobes, I think not. They give no quarter.
I am convinced the point you are really trying to make is that Pope Francis is wrong. Fundamentalism - a rigid adherence to ways that are open to and need revision, refreshement and re-presentaion - is alive and well in certain quarters of The Church. It is seen in those whose concern is more with the letter than the Spirit of the Law, more with historical fact than contemporary faith. We are told there is no virtue without obedience. Now that is a traditional view. It is not traditionalist, fundamentalist or extremist in the way of the put-down merchants. Pope Francis is right. Fundamentalism in any world view or religion is wrong. It neither sees not hears, only excludes and condemns.
That has been the case for years. The difference now is that the Pope will be the source for those who would marginalise orthodox Catholics, irrespective of what will be the Pope's final word on who can receive Communion. If he holds fast to Church teaching, they will say that the poor Holy Father had his arm twisted by the fundamentalists. If he relaxes the rules, they will see it as a victory and the marginalisation will continue, with the next goal being whichever Church teaching they see as most vulnerable. If they get their way on the definition of Adultery, all ten commandments are open to interpretation. Our Church has always been under attack from within. The difference nowadays is that the divisions are known to all the faithful thanks to mass media. We need to pray, hope and trust in God now more than ever in the Church's history. Schisms in the past have affected regions or countries. Any schism caused by this could have universal consequences. I'm very worried that, with Cardinal Sarah in Rome, some Bishops in Africa could have been leaned on to support Cardinal Kasper's stance or risk losing funds for much need projects should the German church go into schism. God be with the days when we common or garden Catholics knew nothing of what was going on in the higher echelons of the Church. I know that it is wrong to be so suspicious of the hierarchy, but that niggling worry is always at the back of my mind even when the Pope's words are clearly guided by the Holy Spirit when he focuses on the poor. Keep on praying, hoping and trusting in God.
Joe ,I just wanted to let you know. I appreciate your defense of our Holy Father. Ive been silent lately, my brain is killing me right now, otherwise I'd post rebuttels as well. I agree with you, am I wasting time? as BFL pointed out, we never change any minds, but as David said, we need to reply as well. I stand behind you Joe and others !!!! Watching the Papal Mass on Sunday, the commentator stated the Pope was going to the Masque later in his trip. This Masque was surrounded by Christian milita groups... perhaps the broader context of fundamentalism, not I say a rosary...etc
Just to be clear Joe, everybody on this site will stand by Pope Francis on any ex cathedra statement he chooses to make.[imo]
But I think that not everyone on this forum seems to agree with the following from the Catechism: The Pope, Bishop of Rome and Peter's successor, "is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful. For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered."
We Catholics have some — and not some, many — who believe they possess the absolute truth and go ahead dirtying the other with calumny, with disinformation, and doing evil. They do evil. I say this because it is my Church.” Sweeping statement or what? Where are the many 'who believe they possess the absolute truth' in the Church. The pews are empty. The confessional lines are empty. The monasteries are empty. The seminaries are empty. Catholicism is on its knees in Europe and in many other places and the faith is dying. I would really like to know who the fundamentalists the Pope is referring to? And it is not his Church. It is Jesus Christ's Church founded on the rock of Peter. Thank God for the charism if infallibility - proof that the Church is of Divine origin. I believe and will hold that the Pope has made and error of judgement in using the term fundamentalist in relation to believers in the Catholic Church. He has made errors before even in his encyclical which was full of scientific mistakes. He said a strong scientific “consensus” finds recent warming mostly manmade. No: only 0.3 percent. He said the “consensus” reports significant global warming. No: none for 18 years and eight months. He said sea level is rising steadily. No: It is hardly rising at all, and fell from 2003 to 2008. He said polar ice-caps are melting. No: Global sea-ice extent has barely changed in 35 years. He said rapid warming and consequent destruction of ecosystems may occur this century. No: That prediction will prove no better than the predictions that have gone so wrong already. He called CO2 “pollution.” No: It is a trace gas essential to all life on Earth. He complained about the “acidity” of the oceans. No: The oceans are and will remain alkaline. We have enough political division within the Church with words like conservative and liberal being thrown about but now we can add fundamentalist. And the Pharisees too. So, the Church must be full of Pharisees and fundamentalists in the Pope's eyes. Sorry, I plain disagree and I am entitled to disagree as a lay person trying to live out my faith in a secular and hedonistic world where the real enemy is the world, the flesh and the devil. Perhaps, the Pope meant ultra-traditionalist rather than fundamentalist? We might have to wait until his next flight to find out.
Agree 100%. He is our brother in Christ and supreme pastor of the flock. I would follow him into the trenches. People assume too readily that if we disagree with something he says we are disloyal. I have kept the command to honour my earthly father but I do not agree with everything he says. That does not mean that I dishonour him just because I disagree with something he says. The Pope does not speak ex cathedra on a plane flight. He has my prayers.
The global warming scam is the vehicle of the socialists, communists and population controllers to impose their agenda on mankind, an agenda that was wholly rejected when they tried to impose under a frontal socialist/ communist assault on the west. That's why they hide under the environmentalist banner. Who could possibly object to efforts to save baby polar bears, seals and whales? This is the agenda this pope has endorsed and helped to further with his recent encyclical and address to the Paris climate summit. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/01/ding-dong-godfather-global-warming-dead/ Ding, Dong – The Godfather Of Global Warming Is Dead! Paris, COP21 Climate Summit – One of the most dangerous men of the Twentieth Century has just died: and the weird thing is, hardly anyone noticed. His name was Maurice Strong (picture above, on the right), Canadian billionaire, diplomat and UN apparatchik, and though you may not have heard of him, he probably did more to make your world a more expensive, inconvenient, overregulated, hectored, bullied, lied-to, sclerotic, undemocratic place than anyone post Hitler, Stalin and (his personal friend) Mao. He’s the reason, for example, that most of the world’s leaders, 40,000 delegates and their attendant carbon mega-footprint descended here on Paris yesterday in order to talk about magical fairy dust for two weeks and then charge you $1.5 trillion (that’s per year, by the way) for the privilege. He’s the reason that “climate change” is now so heavily embedded within our system of global governance that it is now almost literally impossible for any politician or anyone else whose career depends on the state to admit that’s it not a problem and to argue that there are more important issues in the world, like maybe the terrorism that killed over 130 innocent people just the other week now, where was it?- oh yeah, here in Paris where for some bizarre reason all the delegates are talking about carbon emissions instead… He was the father of the mother of all climate summits: the one in Rio in 1992 that spawned a million and one bastard offspring, like the one in Paris now. He was the main instigator of the blueprint for arguably the most sinister and insidious assault on liberty and free markets: Agenda 21. If you had met him – if you’d even noticed him – you would have probably quite liked him: One of the most remarkable things about Strong was how unremarkable he was in person. Somebody once said that you wouldn’t pick him out of a crowd of two. Nevertheless, he was an avuncular and likeable figure, even to those who disagreed strongly with his world view, as I did. I interviewed him numerous times over a 20-year period, and found that he took scarcely-concealed delight in explaining his often Machiavellian political manoeuvrings. But as I argue in Watermelons – which gave a lot of space to Strong – it’s a big mistake to expect that supervillains will always have scars down the side of their face and fluffy white cat on their lap. Strong’s true evil lay in the effects of his acts, not in his (claimed) good intentions. Then again, the mask did occasionally slip. In his 2000 autobiography Where Are We Going? he projected that by 2031 two thirds of the world’s population might have been wiped out. This, he chillingly described as: “A glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration.” See: it’s perfectly OK to fantasize about the deaths of maybe 5 billion people – as long as you show at the end that you really care: you’re thinking about the future of humanity. Strong sincerely believed all this Malthusian stuff and that was the problem. It became our problem because unfortunately – see that charm, above – he was such a skilled operator, with an endless appetite for labyrinthine bureaucracy and the will to embed it in the system. The United Nations, which he joined early in 1947 as a lowly assistant pass officer in the Identification Unit of the Security Section in New York, was his perfect playground. It was where, he quickly realized, he could achieve his dream of a world of global governance by a self-appointed elite. And the best way to go about this, he understood, was by manipulating and exploiting international concern about the environment. Strong was never shy of admitting what he was about: “Our concept of ballot box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions, particularly in terms of safeguarding the global environment.” Or, as he put it when he’d wormed his way through the system to the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1991: Current lifestyle and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning and surburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations. This was the purpose of the Rio Earth Summit – and on the non-binding but secretly deadly agreement Strong managed to gull 179 sovereign nations into signing: Agenda 21. If you don’t know about Agenda 21, you should. This final quote from Strong will give you an idea how illiberal and undemocratic it is – a blueprint for one-world government by an unelected bureaucracy of technocrats, enabled by diehard progressive activists. The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental co-operation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of global environmental security. Now perhaps you understand why the people in the world most saddened by Maurice Strong’s death are currently all at Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris at COP21, plotting the new world order. “We thank Maurice Strong for his visionary impetus to our understanding of sustainability. We will miss you,” said Christina Figueres, the head of the UNFCC, which is in charge of the Paris conference. The rest of us, once familiar with what Maurice Strong did, may not feel quite so teary-eyed. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, they say. But I think we can make an exception for this particular totalitarian control freak.
Brian...your views are not very Catholic. You base all your assumptions on a very small area of the world. Climate change is real globally. Maybe not in the United States or Canada because we actually care about the environment. We have mufflers, we save trees, we have national parks, we have lands designated to preserve. The bigger picture is much greater then you. In China there are Cities that the sun is blocked for weeks because of factory gases. The rain forest is being destroyed as we speak. Parts of Africa did turn into sand once trees disappeared. Its not all about the United States. The biggest cover up the world has seen is the japanese nuclear reactors that is spilling nuclear waste (at this moment) into the ocean. We forget that nuclear waste last thousands of years and is being transported by the fish globally. The big picture is much greater then Brian's world. The Pope seems to see the bigger picture...the Universal Catholic Church.
I agree that the environment is being destroyed in places, but that is not the same as climate change. Climate change is a myth, pollution is not.
Thanks. The ignorance and belching forth of globull warming propaganda on this forum is breathtaking.
The Real St. Francis, Catholic Fundamentalist "When it came to Catholic dogma and doctrine, Francis was no proto-dissenter. He was, as Thompson puts it, “fiercely orthodox” (see below), even insisting in later life that friars guilty of liturgical abuses or dogmatic deviations should be remanded to higher church authorities (135-136). Hence it shouldn’t surprise us that Francis’s famous conversation in Egypt in 1219 with Sultan al-Kamil and his advisors wasn’t an exercise in interfaith pleasantries. While Francis certainly did not mock Islam, the saint politely told his Muslim interlocutors that he was there to explicate the truth of the Christian faith and save the sultan’s soul (66-70). Nothing more, nothing less... Unlike many other medieval religious reformers, however, Francis rejected abstinence from meat and wasn’t a vegetarian. Nor was there a trace of pantheism in Francis’s conception of nature (56). Francis’s references and allusions to nature in his writings, preaching, and instruction were overwhelmingly drawn from the scriptures rather than the environment itself (55). More generally, Francis saw the beauty in nature and the animal world as something that should lead to worship and praise of God (58)—not things to be invested with god-like qualities. G.K. Chesterton’s 1923 popular biography of Francis makes a similar point: though he loved nature, Francis never worshipped nature itself. Francis’s relationship to nature, Thompson observes, shouldn’t be romanticized. The saint even viewed vermin and mice, for example, as “agents of the devil” (225)... No-one should be stunned by any of this. Saint Francis of Assisi was, after all, a Catholic. Neither Ignatius of Loyola nor Francis of Assisi treated the created world as a rosy abstraction. Appreciating and respecting the environment didn’t mean disdaining everything else—including human beings, human work, and human creativity—or forgetting that, as the Church Father, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, once wrote: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” However much legend and mythology has blurred the real Francis of Assisi over time, the genuine drama of his life and the forces he unleashed in medieval Europe mean that he’s perhaps fated to have any number of ideological programs thrust upon him. In the end, however, we should remember that while Francis of Assisi continues to have many things to say to everyone today, at the core of all those things is the Catholic vision of God, man and the world. One can safely say that, for Saint Francis himself, any other interpretation would be impossible." ---Abstracted from Samuel Gregg, Crisis magazine, Getting to know the Real St. Francis Augustine Thompson O.P’s meticulously researched Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (2012)
