Remember when popes used precise language so they couldn’t be misinterpreted? Seems very long ago.
Burn of 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.
Pope Leo ought to concern himself as Vicar of Christ about the individuals who knowingly and evilly reject going to heaven because of their hatred of God.
If he’s going to tweet (and I don’t think he should), he should stick to quotes from scripture or the saints…. such as:
“He must increase; I must decrease.”
And believe it.
I am not a fan the “Social Medium Formerly Known as Twitter.” Sound bites and short statements like these do not always do justice to Sacred Scripture and Tradition. They lend themselves to an oversimplification of the faith.
I doubt that Pope Leo really believes in universal salvation, which has never been the teaching of the Church. Universalists will misconstrue 1 Timothy 2:4, trying to teach this idea. They oversimplify the truth.
But St Peter warned about the difficulty of oversimplifying the letters of “our beloved brother Paul” in 2 Peter 3:16:
“In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures.”
It is a disservice to assume that Leo is a bumbler. There is nothing to indicate this in his CV.
As such, when statements are misleading, vague, or wrong we ought to do him the service (in deference to “human dignity”) that he has expressed himself in the way he desired to express himself.
Agreed, Optimist. Given the stream of Modernist word salad he has uttered in recent weeks, he must be either a Modernist himself, or incapable of expressing ideas clearly and simply. The latter seems most unlikely to me.