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PopeWatch: Protestant Pope

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Sandro Magister at his blog Chiesa gives us details on the Pope’s ongoing celebration of the Reformation by gearing up for Reformation II:

 

 

ROME, July 22, 2016 – In the alarmed letter that thirteen cardinals from five continents were preparing to deliver to Pope Francis at the beginning of the last synod, they were warning him against leading the Catholic Church as well to “the collapse of liberal Protestant churches in the modern era, accelerated by their abandonment of key elements of Christian belief and practice in the name of pastoral adaptation:”

> Thirteen Cardinals Have Written to the Pope. Here’s the Letter (12.10.2015)

Then at the last moment the thirteen deleted these two lines from the letter that was actually put into the hands of the pope. But today they would put them back in word for word, seeing the ever more pronounced idyll that is developing between Francis and the followers of Luther.

On October 31, Jorge Mario Bergoglio will fly to Lund, Sweden, where he will be met by the local female bishop, to celebrate together with the Lutheran World Federation the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. And the closer that date gets, the more sympathy the pope manifests for the great heretic.

At the last of his in-flight press conferences, on the way back from Armenia, he sang the praises of Luther. He said that he was moved by the best of intentions, and that his reform was “medicine for the Church,” skimming over the essential dogmatic divergences that for five centuries have pitted Protestants and Catholics against each other, because – these are again his words, this time spoken in the Lutheran temple of Rome – “life is greater than explanations and interpretations”:

> In-Flight Press Conference…

The ecumenism of Francis is made like this. The primacy goes to the gestures, the embraces, some charitable act done together. He leaves doctrinal disagreements, even the most profound, to the discussions of theologians, whom he would gladly confine “to a desert island,” as he loves to say only half-jokingly.

The hitherto unsurpassed proof of this approach of his was, last November 15 during his visit to the Lutherans of Rome, the response that he gave to a Protestant woman who asked him if she could receive communion at Mass together with her Catholic husband.

The response from Francis was a phantasmagorical whirlygig of yes, no, I don’t know, you figure it out. But not because the pope didn’t know what to say. His expressive “fluidity” was intentional. It was his way of bringing everything back into discussion, making everything thinkable and therefore practicable:

> Responses of the Holy Father…

Right on cue, in fact, came “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that has now become the grapevine of the Casa Santa Marta, to confirm that yes, Francis had wanted to convey precisely this: that even Protestants can receive communion at a Catholic Mass:

> Communion For All, Even For Protestants (1.7.2016)

It is laying it on a bit thick when Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, says that “we Catholics do not have any reason to celebrate October 31, 1517, the beginning of the Reformation that led to the rupture of Western Christendom.”

Pope Francis isn’t even listening to him and is joining the party, indifferent that Müller – who was in fact one of the thirteen cardinals of the memorable letter – sees it as another step toward the “Protestantization” of the Catholic Church:

> How Cardinal Müller Is Rereading the Pope (29.3.2016)

A pope like Bergoglio, in reality, would not be distasteful to a modern Luther. No more indulgences or purgatory, which five centuries ago were the spark of the rupture. And instead a superlative exaltation of divine mercy, which washes away gratis the sins of all:

Go here to read the rest.  I am nostaligic for those days, and how long ago they seem, when the query “Is the Pope Catholic?” was a mere figure of speech instead of an actual question that someone must think about before answering.

 

 

 

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Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Monday, July 25, AD 2016 7:54am

Yes, the entire point of Vatican II was to Protestantize the Catholic Church and Pope Francis is the apotheosis of that catastrophic move.

Here is an most prescient excerpt from an article written in 1960 just before Vatican II by Monsignor Antonio Romeo of the Sacred Congregation for Seminaries and Universities appearing in Divinitas in an attack against the Biblical Institute concerning the existence of a neo-modernist conspiracy to undermine the faith.

“…thus they have arrived today at the “new theology” inspired by the slogans of the moment, at the “new” morality which tries to satisfy human passions and abolish the notion and sense of sin, at the “new history” which validates historicism or the triumph
of fact, at the “new law” which proclaims the liberty of evil and of those who are powerful enough to allow themselves anything, at the “new psychology” based on pan-sexual psychoanalysis, at the “new pedagogy” which satisfies every instinct, at the
“new sacred art” which exalts surrealism and conceptualism of charlatans. …Founded on the double myth of human liberty and human progress, two fold gnostic postulate that deifies the fleeting contingency of our individual value and of eternal collective flow toward and unknown future, making it a surrogate for the Absolute, today’s progressives transform religion and science into an unending search, without defining purpose, the object and the “constants” that every faith and every science must also pre-establish for itself. Thus we can observe the triumph of indeterminacy, that is, of relativism and , basically, denial.”

Philip
Philip
Monday, July 25, AD 2016 2:52pm

Relativism!

In chapter four of Will to Love, St. Maximilian Kolbe finishes with this paragraph; “One Church, not many.
Christ knew that various prophets would arise and he warned against them and he knew too that every person will not always be capable of telling the difference in distinguishing which is the church that he established. That is why he expressly pointed out when he turned to Peter and said these words; You are rock and Upon This Rock I will build my Church. Yes, his church the one Church of Christ and not many churches.”

To preach otherwise is….well, problematic.
To spread the contagion that is relativism is a disservice. A true disservice to God and man.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Monday, July 25, AD 2016 3:27pm

This Pontiff celebrating the anniversary of the Reformation is just cause to have him deposed and locked up in a Trappist monastery. He is unfit to be the Vicar of Christ of the Catholic Church. If he likes Lutherans so much then he can resign his office and go join the Lutherans. Which Lutheran Church to join? The ELCA? The LCMS? The Wisconsin Synod? That is his problem.

I am sick and tired of this Pope. There is NO reason for any Catholic to commemorate what Luther did. The suffering of the Catholics of England, Scotland and Ireland mean nothing to this Pontiff.

From 1655-1660 the Lutheran Swedish Army invaded the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and almost completely destroyed the Commonwealth. The Swedes plundered churches, libraries and even graves. Almost nothing has ever been returned. The invasion cost the Commonwealth a third of its territory, lost to Russia, and weakened the Commonwealth to the point that it was wiped off the map in the 1790s.

It is not that I hold a grudge against Lutherans or Swedes. The point is that Protestantism has seen Catholics as an enemy for centuries and has never refuted this. Mainline Protestantism is dying and its existence is nothing to celebrate. The second point is that this Pontiff is a failure in his role and desperately needs a St. Catherine of Siena to read him the riot act.

As much as I am angered by this stunt, I am more angry at the Cardinals who elected this old Argentine Jesuit. Anyone who tells me that the SSPX has gone off the rails will get an argument from me.

Mary De Voe
Tuesday, July 26, AD 2016 7:00am

Relativism is the sin of PRESUMPTION. There IS NO MERCY for any person unless he repents and asks for mercy. Without repentance and a firm purpose of amendment there is no mercy. God forces no person into heaven. Heaven is our American Principle of the pursuit of Happiness, achieving oneself in body and soul, our American Principle of the First Amendment of having a relationship with God in worship, speech, press and peaceable assembly in response to the gift of Faith from God and only the gift of Faith from God in response to man’s petition for Faith.
American political correctness imposed removes any free will choice. This unconditional mercy imposed removes any free will choice from the individual to search for and find God in his soul. Yes, God is everywhere. But God does not come into any soul who refuses to allow God.
Yes, Pope Francis is imposing God’s mercy where no mercy is asked for or wanted. Removing, in the meantime, the free will of the soul to love God for being God. Man is now the beast of burden to pay Caesar and serve himself as god as he sees fit even to the condemnation of his own immortal, rational soul. Atheism and the denial of the human, immortal, rational soul imposed by Pope Francis. The Catholic Church UNIVERSAL includes the saints in heaven, our Blessed Virgin Mary, conceived without sin and the poor souls in Purgatory, who have, in their stay on earth, returned to their original innocence into which they were created and procreated. Saints preserve us. St. Catherine of Sienna.

Guy McClung
Admin
Tuesday, July 26, AD 2016 7:27am

Don, Michael, Philip, Penguins Fan and Mary DV, Ditto. Now what can I do? Sometimes it seems all ouir words are empty sound and fury, accomplishing nothing. I will go to Mass, not a meal, the Holy Sacrifice Of The Mass, I will receive Jesus Chrsit, God Almighty, body, blood, soul and divinity, today, and present Him to His Father, and hear Him, My Abba Daddy, say be still, I am still God, by God I AM God, and I act eternally outside time and I am acting. I am. Deo Gratias. Guy McClung, San Antonio, Texas

Philip
Philip
Tuesday, July 26, AD 2016 7:49am

McClung.

Blessings to you.
Your right on point!
Amen.

Penguin Fan
Penguin Fan
Tuesday, July 26, AD 2016 2:02pm

Mr. McClung, I go to the Traditional Latin Mass. I bring my eight year old and will bring my younger son when he is ready. They will know their Faith and Church history. I may be meant for nothing great on Earth, but God may have big ideas for my sons and or their descendants. One day the idiocy in the Church will end.

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