Friday, March 29, AD 2024 6:18am

Amoris Laetitia and Cowardice

Fundamentalism

The most disheartening feature of Amoris Laetitia is not the text itself.  It really hardly comes as a surprise.  Pope Francis since assuming the papacy has given ample evidence that he is anything but orthodox.  What is truly disheartening is the attempts by orthodox Catholics to pretend that all is well, or that Amoris Laetitia is a rejection of the heterodox who now believe they have a Pope on their side.  Michael Dougherty at The Week explains why such attempts are folly and cowardice:

Finally, although the pope rejects a formal institution of the Kasper proposal as a general rule, he strongly encourages the readmission of people in “objectively” adulterous unions to holy communion. He doesn’t trumpet this, of course. He buries it in the 351st footnote. For a man showing such great audacity before God, Francis certainly isn’t bold before men.

Many conservatives are revealing themselves as cowards, too. They hope that because the pope’s document seems so confused and self-contradictory, because it hides its innovations under a ton of verbiage, and buried within footnotes, and because it is merely an exhortation and not a more lofty encyclical, that they can embrace what is good in the document, and pass over the rest. “It could have been worse,” they are telling themselves. “It cites the Church’s teaching against contraception, at least.” I would remind them that their forebears said the same thing about the Vatican II’s document on the liturgy. “Oh, it says Latin shall be retained, it promotes Gregorian chant,” they comforted themselves. As now, the betrayal of the institution was too unthinkable, and they willfully overlooked the footnotes that contained within them a mandate to destroy high altars, tabernacles, altar rails, and institute folk music in a synthetic vernacular liturgy. So too, many conservatives will try to find the good parts, an easy feat in a document so prolix.

But progressives are not so timid. In the talking points handed out to bishops and other spokesmen ahead of the document, the intention was made clear, but plausibly deniable. “Pastors need to do everything possible to help people in these situations to be included in the life of the community.” Words like “possible” and “inclusion” are left to be interpreted broadly, from the footnotes. Cardinal Kasper described the document glowingly as a “definite opening.” Cardinal Schonborn boldly papered over differences between Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II by describing the work of Francis in Amoris Laetitia as the development of doctrine.

 

Traditionalist critics of the modern Church have a kind of slogan: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, the law of prayer is the law of belief. It’s hard not to see how the already incoherent prayer of the Church is leading to incoherent doctrine and practice. The Church officially teaches that confession is necessary to be restored to holy communion after committing a mortal sin, and that receiving communion in a state of sin is itself sacrilege. Yet rare is the pastor who seems troubled by the long lines for communion and the near disappearance of the sacrament of confession among the people in his parish. Everyone just sort of knows the Church doesn’t really mean what it says.

The Church’s blasé attitude here has a pedagogical effect, teaching people that there is no need to have a holy respect or fear when approaching the altar. Naturally, this attitude has worked its way up the chain to a papal pronouncement. Pope Francis’ document justifies people receiving communion in a public state of sin by saying that the Eucharist is “not a prize” for good behavior. That is true. But instead the Church has turned it into a participation trophy, something so perfunctory and ultimately meaningless that it seems just too cruel to deny it to anyone.

Perhaps worse than Pope Francis’ official invitation to sacrilege is the document’s cowardice, cynicism, and pessimism. The Church can no longer even bring itself to condemn respectable sins such as civilly approved adultery. It can barely bring itself to address a man or woman as if they had a moral conscience that could be roused by words like “sin.” Instead, it merely proposes ideals; ideals cannot be wounded by your failure to realize them. And it promises to help you out of your “irregular” situation.

This supposed paean to love is something much sadder. A Church so anxious to include and accept you that it must deny the faith that transforms and renews you. It admits that God’s commands are not just beyond our reach, but possibly destructive to follow.

Pope Francis is trying to be more merciful than God himself. He ends up being more miserly and condescending instead.

Go here to read the rest.  Christ died on the cross to give us the Faith.  It has survived 2000 turbulent years.  Now, in our time, all too many of us stand by idly as Pope Francis and his merry band of heretics do their worst to destroy the Faith.  At mass we beg forgiveness for what we have done and what we have failed to do.  I have long thought that more people find themselves damned for sins of omission than sins of commission.  It is not easy to stand up in such times, particularly when the overwhelming number of bishops and priests are acting as if everything they purportedly believed can be turned on its head overnight, and they will simply applaud like trained seals eager for fish.  However, it is precisely in such times as these when faithful laity must stand and make their voices heard.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
8 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Monday, April 11, AD 2016 8:01pm

I saw that over at Father Z’s place.
.
I like the next post, which I shall dub “Be Not Afraid of Septuagenarian Parentheses,” better.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Tuesday, April 12, AD 2016 4:34am

Thanks Donald for bringing Michael Dougherty’s insightful and spot-on article to our attention from the very secular and somewhat liberal This Week. For truth, clarity and perception he far out does most writers in supposedly Catholic sources.

And I guess this should be no surprise as our very feminized and cowardly Church no longer has the courage of it’s convictions and, perhaps more accurately, no convictions at all.

Father of Seven
Father of Seven
Tuesday, April 12, AD 2016 5:04am

Thank you Donald. That was truly well-written. I reread Mathew 19 last night. You cannot square the Pope’s words with Christ’s. We have the answer as to what had to give.

Don L
Don L
Tuesday, April 12, AD 2016 6:29am

Cowardly, cunning? This reeks of the leftist game of hiding the diabolical under a million stained glass windows. There’s always a reason for excess verbiage.

I recall JPII’s bold pastoral exhortation (love that word) to call sin, sin, and evil , evil.

Ken
Ken
Tuesday, April 12, AD 2016 6:40am

I thought Cardinal Burke’s takedown of the exhortation was beautiful. Two reactions I don’t understand are the orthodox Catholics trying to twist this 260 page monster into some sort of treasure and the right wing nut jobs screaming, “this is the end”.

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Tuesday, April 12, AD 2016 8:25am

Like many readers here, I have often been an amateur student of modern revolutions: 1769 France; 1848 France; 1917 Russia, in particular; 1921-1933, Germany. You could add the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, and the 1936 Palestinian revolt. Of course, 1917 Russia in particular is specifically related to Our Lady’s message at Fatima, as is well-known.

The first step in a successful revolution is the destroying of the values of the existing regime: hand-in-hand with that is the absolute justification of “all means necessary” to the individual revolutionaries to carry out the assault—because their cause is absolutely “good” and supreme. That of course even means violence, if needed.

[ In Evangelii Gaudium, this pontiff actually walked right up to that precipice, in speaking of the injustices against the poor (EG 59-60), because his premise is that “inequality [necessarily] provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system” {EG 59}, e.g. a fait accompli. Not true: the most oppressed of humanity do not have to abandon their innate desire for good and mercy to their fellow man, even to their “oppressors”, Holy Father. ]

That is why the Franciscans of Mary Immaculate had to be taken down; Cardinal Burke; many other institutions and individuals, who had given their lives to the Church they once knew.
….
On the moral level, the Bergoglio papacy started this rhetorical assault some time ago by endlessly attacking “fundamentalists” within the Catholic Church and inevitably elevating non-Christians— in particular, esp. Muslims— as examples of Christ’s teaching. He was safe to do so, especially by wrapping himself in his self-acclaimed status of being “a son of the Church”. He has generally ignored (comparatively speaking) the mass murder of Christians in the Middle East. Spasmodic and occasional acknowledgments don’t count, considering the enormity of the holocaust.
….
But the revolution now moves on to its next phase: replacement of new revolutionary values, the intended fracturing of institutions, and necessarily the ultimate purge of “reactionaries.” Putative Pope Kasper. We are in only the first stages of the dialectical struggle, and the supine response of “conservative” Catholics dooms the outcome. Does anyone on the practical level see any stemming of the tide? History is a mean mistress.

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Tuesday, April 12, AD 2016 8:30am

By the way, on a different “front”, watching what Obama has done to race relations and the inversion of political equality and its replacement by condemnations of “white privilege” and the absolute justification of minority-group revolutionaries in their Ferguson-Baltimore-Chicago South Side criminal acts is evidence of the revolution unleashed here.
The outcome? With a supine “conservative” opposition? Please review and listen to Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” (again) and that is where we are certainly headed.

Heartlander
Heartlander
Wednesday, April 13, AD 2016 12:22am

“the document’s cowardice, cynicism, and pessimism…. It can barely bring itself to address a man or woman as if they had a moral conscience that could be roused by words like “sin.” Instead, it merely proposes ideals; ideals cannot be wounded by your failure to realize them. And it promises to help you out of your “irregular” situation.

“This supposed paean to love is something much sadder. A Church so anxious to include and accept you that it must deny the faith that transforms and renews you. It admits that God’s commands are not just beyond our reach, but possibly destructive to follow.”

Reminds me of Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” — a portrayal of the Church hierarchy feeding its members a bunch of mush because it thinks: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top