Monsignor Pope Ping!
That guy CLEARLY just got off of work (note the work clothes) and is just depressurizing.
Other than completely taking off the tie that is me evey day pretty much until I was married. After a 10-12 day. Which was every day, 5 days a week and I was exempt so no OT.
I am serious -- that is just wrong.
Sloth is the difficult experience on the path through the “Dark-Night-of-the-Soul” as you are letting go of the old self and “dying daily,” but have not yet found the Light of God within.
Sloth happens when I lose my old self identity and the motivation associated with it, but have not yet found my new identity and motivation in following God’s Will and experiencing God. It’s a tough place to be.
For all of our modern claims of being tolerant and open-minded, a better description is that we are just plain lazy and slothful when it comes to seeking the truth.
Sloth[edit]
Main article: Sloth (deadly sin)
Sloth
Parable of the Wheat and the Tares by Abraham Bloemaert, Walters Art Museum
Sloth (Latin, tristitia or acedia (”without care”)) refers to a peculiar jumble of notions, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and physical states.[30] It may be defined as absence of interest or habitual disinclination to exertion.[31]
In his Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas defined sloth as “sorrow about spiritual good”.[2]
The scope of sloth is wide.[30] Spiritually, acedia first referred to an affliction attending religious persons, especially monks, wherein they became indifferent to their duties and obligations to God.
Mentally, acedia has a number of distinctive components of which the most important is affectlessness, a lack of any feeling about self or other, a mind-state that gives rise to boredom, rancor, apathy, and a passive inert or sluggish mentation,
Physically, acedia is fundamentally associated with a cessation of motion and an indifference to work; it finds expression in laziness, idleness, and indolence.[30]
Sloth includes ceasing to utilize the seven gifts of grace given by the Holy Spirit (Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Knowledge, Piety, Fortitude, and Fear of the Lord); such disregard may lead to the slowing of one’s spiritual progress towards eternal life, to the neglect of manifold duties of charity towards the neighbor, and to animosity towards those who love God.[5]
Sloth has also been defined as a failure to do things that one should do. By this definition, evil exists when “good” people fail to act.
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) wrote in Present Discontents (II. 78) “No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Unlike the other capital sins, which are sins of committing immorality, sloth is a sin of omitting responsibilities. It may arise from any of the other capital vices; for example, a son may omit his duty to his father through anger. While the state and habit of sloth is a mortal sin, the habit of the soul tending towards the last mortal state of sloth is not mortal in and of itself except under certain circumstances.[5]
Emotionally and cognitively, the evil of acedia finds expression in a lack of any feeling for the world, for the people in it, or for the self. Acedia takes form as an alienation of the sentient self first from the world and then from itself. Although the most profound versions of this condition are found in a withdrawal from all forms of participation in or care for others or oneself, a lesser but more noisome element was also noted by theologians. From tristitia, asserted Gregory the Great, “there arise malice, rancour, cowardice, [and] despair...” Chaucer, too, dealt with this attribute of acedia, counting the characteristics of the sin to include despair, somnolence, idleness, tardiness, negligence, indolence, and wrawnesse, the last variously translated as “anger” or better as “peevishness”. For Chaucer, human’s sin consists of languishing and holding back, refusing to undertake works of goodness because, he/she tells him/her self, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of good are too grievous and too difficult to suffer. Acedia in Chaucer’s view is thus the enemy of every source and motive for work.[32]
Sloth not only subverts the livelihood of the body, taking no care for its day-to-day provisions, but also slows down the mind, halting its attention to matters of great importance. Sloth hinders the man in his righteous undertakings and thus becomes a terrible source of human’s undoing.[32]
In his Purgatorio Dante portrayed the penance for acedia as running continuously at top speed.
Dante describes acedia as the failure to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s mind and all one’s soul; to him it was the middle sin, the only one characterised by an absence or insufficiency of love. Some scholars[who?] have said that the ultimate form of acedia was despair which leads to suicide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins
From the article, it has a variety of interpretations. The above gives a little more of the history.
Then, he comes up with stuff like this.
It sickens me that he is lecturing on sloth when he has no idea how the modern world puts many, many, lay professional people on a treadmill from childhood to old age.
Schooling that is really, really HARD not puff courses and feelgood self-examinations like he did to earn his credentials.
Ridiculous hours training for me but not for priests in training.
Taxes of half our earnings. Not so much for them.
Millions of others stateside and around the world with their hands out. Nice sermons browbeating us to give up our wealth or suffer the consequences.
Millions and millions of illegals coming here, living off the fat of the land, popping out kids by the truckload.
And the Roman Catholic Church and Msgr. Pope endorses it all. More illegals, more, more, more. We have so much to give them!
Revolting hypocrisy for him to criticize normals in this essay. He ought to be cracking on welfare queens who pop out offspring so they can get guaranteed support from the Great Society that the Church endorses with its Catholic votes.
Scum illegals who sell drugs and get on the dole here, and, of course, procreate like vermin to amplify their government support payments.
And some poor SOB like me working 70 hour weeks to support them all.
It's OK though, I get breaks every now and then to be told by the TV that I am what is wrong with America.
Or, I get to read Msgr. Pope tell me that I am lazy.
Once again, a great article: “We must understand that spiritual progress grows in stages, ...”
Several weeks ago, my dh mentioned something about small miracles happening that some may neglect to see, busily praying for the larger miracle, or maybe not praying at all.
Then on Ash Wednesday, when everyone went up for their ashes, I heard the priest [when my turn came] say every single word crystal clear and I have not heard clarity in decades [profound hearing loss]. The same was repeated when I went up for Communion. It was the type of miracle my husband had just spoken of days earlier, and Father was very excited when I told him about this. Why did it happen? Could have something to do with Msgr. Pope’s message.
“Sunday, once the highlight of the week for many (due to the beauty of the liturgy...
I just cringe while waiting out whatever heretical mistranslation appears next.
“and the music”
Now destroyed by guitar plunking philistines playing music committed by no-talent sodomites.
“the hearing of the sermon”
It’s been so long since I heard a homily that seemed to be aimed at intelligent, educated adults, that I actually remember the occasion.
“the joy of fellowship”
Ain’t no fellowship for conservatives in this diocese.
“and the quiet of Holy Communion)”
Some quiet would be really nice.”
“...is now considered boring and about as appealing as going to the dentist.”
Which one is more likely to become the occasion of sin?