PopeWatch: Contradictions

PopeWatch is FRATELLI TUTTIed out for the moment, and will reserve further commentary by him on the Pope’s latest Encyclical for later dates.  In the meantime Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture has listed a few of the issues on which the Encyclical contradicts Catholic teaching:

In the current pontificate, I submit, it has become simply impossible to square the Pope’s statements with those of his predecessors. This problem became acute with the release of Amoris Laetitia; it is exacerbated in Fratelli Tutti. Take just a few noteworthy examples:

• The death penalty. My copy of the Catechism, the 1994 edition, says that “the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.” Pope John Paul II amended that section, to say that cases justifying capital punishment “are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” But that formula still allowed for the possibility that execution could be warranted; it did not contradict the prior authoritative statements that acknowledged the state’s right to invoke the ultimate penalty. Now Pope Francis takes a step further, saying that execution is “inadmissible,” and calling for a worldwide effort to abolish what the Catholic Church once declared just. In doing so the Pope does not address the Thomistic arguments for retributive justice, but bases his appeal exclusively on the state’s duty to protect citizens from criminals. He argues (#267) that “it is impossible to imagine that states today have no other means than capital punishment to protect the lives of other people from the unjust aggressor.” (Notice that if you can imagine circumstances that require execution to protect innocent lives— and I certainly can; can’t you?— then the Pope’s argument falls.)
• Just war. The Catechism also outlines the conditions under which limited warfare may be morally justifiable. But Pope Francis— in a section subtitled “The injustice of war”— writes (#242):
  

  We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a “just war.”

  The awkward formulation “probably always” makes it difficult to understand how the Pontiff could issue a blanket condemnation of all military action. Couldn’t a carefully limited strategy minimize the risks that he mentions? Pope Francis thinks not. “Every war leaves our world worse than it was before,” he writes (261). But if every war is always unjustified, then it seems the Church— which for centuries taught of justice in warfare— has changed her teaching.

• Private property. In a footnote to paragraph 119, Pope Francis writes that “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.” True, the Church has never agreed that private property involves an absolute right; Catholic social teaching is clear on the universal destination of the world’s goods and the “social mortgage” on property. But Pope Leo XII wrote in Rerum Novarum (#15): “The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.” Here is a flat contradiction: Pope Leo says the right to private property is inviolable; Pope Francis says it is not inviolable— and tosses in the obviously false claim that the magisterium has never suggested otherwise.

Throughout Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis shows a clear hostility toward private property, the market economy, and capitalism. To be sure, previous Pontiffs have frequently commented on the limitations of the marketplace, insisting that a healthy society requires a stronger moral base than a strictly economic outlook can provide. But Pope Francis rarely invokes the arguments set forth by previous Popes. (More than half of the citations in this encyclical are of his own previous works.) Other Pontiffs stressed the crucial importance of healthy marriages and strong families as forming the basis for a healthy society. Fratelli Tutti never mentions marriage, and when the word “family” appears, it is invariably a reference to the whole human family, not the nuclear family.

While the failure to invoke previous Pontiffs is a defect in Fratelli Tutti, it is just one sign of the encyclical’s fatal flaw: the absence of any distinctively Catholic perspective. The word “new” appears twice as often as the name “Jesus.” There is little or no mention of prayer, the Gospel, or the sacraments. Pope Francis writes a great deal about the economy of the marketplace, very little about the economy of salvation.

Go here to read the rest.  Mormon prophets are free to flatly contradict prior Mormon teaching since Mormons believe their prophets are a source of ongoing revelation.  That is not the role of Catholic popes, but Pope Francis, as is the case with so much Catholic teaching, seems not to understand that, and that makes him, by far, the worst Pope in the history of the Church, not from a moral standpoint, but from the standpoint of upholding the teaching of the Church, which is the chief duty of the Vicar of Christ.