No surprise:
The Vatican has defended one of its recently released documents on the coronavirus pandemic that didn’t mention God as an effort to reach “the widest possible audience.” The 8-page “Humana Communitas in the Age of Pandemic: Untimely Meditations on Life’s Rebirth” was published by the Pontifical Academy for Life on July 22.
“We are interested in entering into human situations, reading them in the light of faith, and in a way that speaks to the widest possible audience, to believers and non-believers, to all men and women ‘of good will,’” said Fabrizio Mastrofini, a spokesman of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
“I do not know, at this point, whether a philological ‘accounting’ work on how many times a few key words recur in a text is useful,” Mastrofini said in response to an article published by New Daily Compass on July 31 (Italian: July 28).
“Your readers are entitled to know something else: the criticism of the lack of the terms God, faith, religion, was first put forward by an American website, then repeated by Spanish websites, and finally also in Italy by some passionate blogger,” he pointed out, failing to explain how that fact was of any relevance.
Phil Lawler of Catholic Word News had called the document shortly after its release on July 22 a “shocking Vatican perspective on the pandemic” and “an embarrassment to the Catholic faithful.”
According to Lawler, a well-respected Catholic journalist, even the title of the document “is misleading; the document provides very little hard information. But I will grant this much: it is ‘untimely.’ There is never a good time for this sort of vapid rumination.”
“Despite stretching to well over 4,000 words, the Vatican document does not mention God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the sacraments, prayer, or even charity; even the word ‘Christian’ does not appear in the text,” Lawler summarized. “There is admittedly a call for ‘moral conversion,’ but in context it is clearly a call for an ideological rather than religious conversion.”
Go here to read the rest. The current gang at the Vatican brings to mind this passage from an updated version of The Little List Song from The Mikado:
Bishops who don’t believe in God
Chief constables who do
Of course the only reason we pay any attention to the Vatican is because of God, something they clearly do not understand as they busily anoint the fashionable Leftism of the chattering classes of the West. Currently a gang of unrepentant prodigal sons at the Vatican is busily running through a legacy that took twenty centuries to acquire.
Nowadays, the Vatican and God have little in common. Overall, the Church has the pulpit but has evidently lost the faith.
“Of course the only reason we pay attention to the Vatican is because of God…” Well, it certainly isn’t because we’re waiting on a party invite from Cardinal Coco-Puffs.
Would legit love to see exactly how many outside the Catholic faith is bothering to read this thing.
I’m telling you Vatican, nobody cares any more except the choir.
“how many times a few key words recur in a text is useful,”
An amazing admission that God has no part in their thought process.
So the new New Evangelization is not to evangelize at all?
Brilliant!
It was written to bolster the pontificate’s self-citing Magisterium of the Moment.
To wit: it will be useful for the next Document on Human Fraternity episode, in which the pontiff will reveal more new truths about the will of the Almighty.
@Ernst: “ So the new New Evangelization is not to evangelize at all?”
That seems to have been the intended meaning of the abandonment in Lumen Gentium of the doctrine of “outside the Church there is no salvation.” It certainly was the practical result, as demonstrated by, among other things, the precipitous decline in Catholic missionary work worldwide since 1965. By “missionary” I do not mean spreading the “gospel” of liberation theology and contraception, but the real missionary work of converting souls to the one true Faith through Christ’s one true Church. Documents such as this execrable pablum are also an inevitable result.
The Holy See has become the world capital of the religion of secular humanism. Catholicism is nowhere to be seen. Sancta Dei Genetrix, ora pro nobis.