The best insights into what the Pope thinks, and what terrifying journeys into his brain these tend to be, is when he is giving one of his airplane interviews or speaking to Jesuits. Phil Lawler looks at the latest brain droppings of the Pope to some Canadian Jesuits:
Here, I believe, is the ultimate expression of the “hermeneutic of rupture.” In his July 29 conversation with Jesuits in Canada, Pope Francis seems to have said that the Roman Catholic Church ceased to exist!
Read his words and check my logic. The Pope said that “the Church is either synodal or it is not Church.” Then just a few moments later: “Certainly, we can say that the Church in the West had lost its synodal tradition.” So it follows that the “Church in the West” was not Church.
The Pope does concede that synodality— thus, the Church, by his definition— continued. “The Church of the East has preserved it.” But this astonishing statement from this astonishing Pontiff seems to dismiss the authenticity of the “Church in the West”— that is, the Roman Catholic Church, which he now leads. And notice that he does not make this claim as a hypothesis; he begins the crucial sentence with the word “Certainly.”
The Pope’s statement does not specify the historical point at which the Western Church lost its synodal character. But he does point to the time when it was recovered: after Vatican II:
Paul VI set up the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops because he intended to go ahead on this issue. Synod after synod has gone ahead, tentatively, improving, understanding better, maturing.
In his famous 2005 address to the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict decried the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” which alleged “a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church.” But nowhere has that “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” taken such a radical form as this: the suggestion that the Church had ceased to be the Church prior to the Council.
Go here to read the rest. The Pope is an extremely sloppy thinker and writer, but when he is comfortable with his audience what he really believes tends to come wandering out from the labyrinth of his mind. Until Vatican II he seems to believe that the Church which he leads was not the Church. This of course helps explain the ferocious hostility the Pope has to traditional Catholicism. Heckuva job Conclave of 2013, heckuva job.
The Pope’s thinking consists of two invalid principles:
1. Careful disciplined thought is rigid.
2. Rigidity is always bad.
Therefore NONE of his thinking is thought out nor worth 5 seconds of careful deliberation.
And thus he’s continually sawing off the branch he’s standing on.
(Sometimes… he may hit on something… but it’s similar to a blind squirrel finding a nut.)
Where are the Bishops? It would start with just one, and then others would find the courage. The 23rd psalm was written for a reason.
So Jorge Bergoglio was confirmed and became a Jesuit in a non-church. As he was ordained priest in December 1969, we should probably have a look at the validity of his ordinations as well.
Sorry; he brought it up!
Bemoan the supposed loss of a little tradition here, cruelly berate a little tradition there…
Pretend to recover tradition on the one hand, mercilessly crush it on the other.
The destroyer has no hermeneutic. He pretends to have one when it suits him.
Bergoglio does not have the mind of a labyrinth. It’s a mess… a mess like the mess my 14 year old leaves in the kitchen, bathroom, my car,, etc……except that, even as a self centered 14 year old, makes more sense than Bergoglio ever has.
I have no interest in & no intention in participating in PF form of synodal process!! He simply wants an excuse to destroy the church as the “outcome” is predetermined.
[…] Around Traditionis Custodes, Can We Say That It’s No Law at All – Fr. Z’s Blog PopeWatch: No Church – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at The American Catholic Pope Francis, Evelyn Waugh, & […]
Well, he did say to make a mess- maybe that’s his comfort zone. I wonder about the “spectrum” of brain activity. All of us fall prey to red herring distraction and “rabbit holes” …usually innocently enough.
Having been recently reminded of the sweet and seeming innocuous misdirection of Fr. Brown,s.s.
I note that Francis seems not to be the victim of a lack his own discipline, but one who has recognized the “squirrel cage” well meaning people can be locked into- and reinforces the confusion and the “yah but” we got in spades from the attack on biblical and magisterial authority we got from Raymond E. Brown .
Disparate attacks on Truth are all connected
According to that of St. Francis Writings (1623) by Fr. Luke Wadding “At the time of this tribulation, a man, not canonically elected, will be raised to the Pontificate, who, by his cunning, will endeavor to draw many into error…. Some preachers will keep silence about the truth, and others will trample it underfoot and deny it. Sanctity of life will be held in derision even by those who outwardly profess it, for in those days Jesus Christ will send them not a true pastor, but a destroyer.”
[Works of the Seraphic Father St. Francis of Assisi, R. Washbourne Publishing House, 1882, pp. 248-250, with imprimatur by His Excellency William Bernard, Bishop of Birmingham.]
Pretend to recover tradition on the one hand, mercilessly crush it on the other.
The destroyer has no hermeneutic.