Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Besides his historically odd decision to call a council when the Church was strong and had no existential threats to its future, the very liberal Dominican theologian Yves Congar writes in his voluminous [and plodding] memoirs of the 2nd V. Council that even if John XXIII had wanted to preside and guide the Council as the papal authority should have, it had become known by sometime in Nov., 1962 that he was quite ill and dying of stomach cancer, especially by the liberal theologian wing of Congar, Karl Rahner, and Hans Kung.
At that point, they ran riot on what they could do to “redesign a modern Church for modern man.”
If I manage to make it to Heaven, and find Pope John XXIII there too, I will believe he is a saint. Until then, I have my doubts. Mea culpa.
If I manage to make it to Heaven, and find Pope John XXIII there too, I will believe he is a saint. Until then, I have my doubts. Mea culpa.
I think he was personally holy. I think he was also well past his prime when he became Pope, and frequently unwell. Better for all Catholics if had been the stop gap Pope he was intended to be by the Conclave due to his advanced health. I suspect he would have been horrified by many of the bitter fruits of what he initiated.
Thanks, Don. I agree. I apologize for seeming to suggest J-23 might not actually make it to heaven. My thinking is that I’d not expect to see him among the ranks of the previously recognized Saintly Popes. But I’ll probably be surprised by a lot of things if I get that far, not least of which will be my own presence there.
The history of God’s people has been more one of whether God can trust us than one of whether we can trust God.