Friday, March 29, AD 2024 3:38am

PopeWatch: Articles 675 and 676

Hoo boy:

 

A Dutch cardinal has said that Pope Francis’ failure to uphold the Church’s authentic faith makes him think of the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s prophecy of a “final trial” for the Church before the second coming of Christ.

Cardinal Willem Eijk, 64, the Archbishop of Utrecht, made the startling comment in an article published today at the National Catholic Register.

Eijk, who was created a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, got his medical degree before ordination to the priesthood and went on to complete three PhDs in medicine, philosophy and theology.

In the article, the Cardinal laments Pope Francis’ failure to bring clarity on the question of intercommunion with Protestants during last week’s meeting at the Vatican with German bishops. The Pope told the German bishops to obtain unanimous approval on the issue, but, says Cardinal Eijk, he should have simply reminded them of the Church’s clear doctrine and practice.

“By failing to create clarity, great confusion is created among the faithful and the unity of the Church is endangered,” he said.

“Observing that the bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith contained in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church,” he wrote.

That article of the Catechism, which he quoted in full, warns of a trial that will “shake the faith of many believers.” It prophesies a persecution that will “unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.”

Cardinal Eijk warned publicly last year that by failing to clarify Church teaching over divorce and remarriage, Pope Francis was “fracturing” the Church.

Go here to read the rest.  99 year ago Yeats may have summarized our age:

 

       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Both Articles 675 and 676 may be relevant in this Pontificate:

 

675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.574 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth575 will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.576

676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,577 especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.578

 

 

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father of seven
father of seven
Tuesday, May 8, AD 2018 3:54am

He sounds like a bit of a disinterested observer. In reality, he can do something about this situation. Where are the real men, the true shepherds? I’m reminded that only John, out of all the apostles, showed up at the cross.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Tuesday, May 8, AD 2018 5:40am

St. Malachy, pray for us.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Tuesday, May 8, AD 2018 7:53am

I am having difficulty bringing this quote and image up, however the quote is fitting I believe;

https://goo.gl/images/zx3ZkN

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Tuesday, May 8, AD 2018 7:58am

“Who is going to save our church? Not the Bishops. Not our priests and religious. It is up to you the people. You have the minds, the eyes, the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops like bishops, and your religious like religious.” -Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Mary De Voe
Tuesday, May 8, AD 2018 8:51am

Excellent comment Philip and T. Shaw.

Aqua
Aqua
Tuesday, May 8, AD 2018 10:45am

It’s as if Pope Francis and his Cardinal supporters cracked open the Catechism and made a To-Do list: “what must we do to fulfill the conditions of 675/6 and thereby unveil the mystery of iniquity? Check, check, check.”

Cardinal Dolan living it up with the Met Gala blasphemers, just another check mark on their iniquitous To-Do list. “Secular Messianism” indeed.

P.M.
P.M.
Tuesday, May 8, AD 2018 7:58pm

He said it all in one sentence!:
.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Wednesday, May 9, AD 2018 2:29am

Perhaps Matthew Arnold expressed it best:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, May 10, AD 2018 1:41am

” dead wrong on the facts.”

Arnold’s own religion was the emergent pantheism of Hegel that, in the first half of the century had become virtually the agreed religion of highly educated people, disseminated at a lower cultural level by writers like Carlyle, Wordsworth and Emerson.
Thus, in his famous essay on Sweetness and Light, he wrote, “Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty and harmony and complete human perfection so present and paramount; it is impossible to have this idea too present and paramount; but the moral fiber must be braced too. And we, because we have braced the moral fibre, are not on that account in the right way, if at the same time the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection is wanting or misapprehended amongst us; and evidently it is wanting or misapprehended at present. And when we rely as we do on our religious organisations, which in themselves do not and cannot give us this idea, and think we have done enough if we make them spread and prevail, then, I say, we fall into our common fault of overvaluing machinery”

The “explosive growth in both Christianity and Islam” would have been poor consolation to the author of Dover Beach

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