Posted on 12/12/2019 8:59:30 AM PST by ebb tide
December 11, 2019 (Turning Point Project) — Are you confused?
If you follow Catholic news media, you can't help but notice the explosion of bewildering innovations being enacted or proposed for the Church on an almost weekly basis.
The Amazon Synod itself was chock-full of novel ideas — that the Amazon region is a source of revelation, that pantheism and polytheism are valid forms of religious expression, and that the Catholic Church needs to conform itself to Amazonian spirituality. The Synod organizers seemed to be proposing an entirely new kind of Church with an "Amazonian face."
The world got a glimpse of what this new kind of Catholicism might look like with the introduction of Pachamama who, depending on the day of the week, was variously described as the Virgin Mary, Mother Earth, or simply a South American souvenir item.
The Amazon Synod came on top of a number of other rapid-fire shocks to the Catholic system. It was convened only a little more than a year after the publication of Archbishop Vigano's letter, which charged Pope Francis with complicity in the cover-up of several sex abuse cases. But so much has happened since then that the Vigano testimony already seems like ancient history.
So many cover-up-of-abuse stories have emerged since then that they are losing their ability to shock. And even if one still experiences shock, there's little time to recover from it before the Vatican administers the next shock. A short list would include the heavy emphasis on the needs of the LGBT community during the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, followed by a synod on youth and vocational discernment which had hardly a word to say about the vocation of marriage, and, then, an amazingly brief summit on sex abuse, which concluded that sex abuse was somehow caused by clericalism. It was also bewildering that Pope Francis kept promoting scandal-plagued prelates to offices for which they possess little or no qualifications.
All these developments, coming as they did in quick succession, have caused quite a bit of confusion among Catholics. And some people think the confusion is deliberate — the Vatican version of the Cloward-Piven Strategy. Devised by Columbia University-trained sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven — a husband-wife team dedicated to political activism — the strategy advocated a strategic, organized overloading of the public welfare system. This would, as they wrote in a famous 1966 article in The Nation, create "a political crisis ... that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty."
The strategy can be used to undermine confidence in any system — the immigration system, the electoral system, or the judicial system. The trick is to overwhelm the system with repeated demands in the hope that the resulting confusion will provide the conditions for implementing radical changes.
At this point, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that key Church leaders have adopted a similar strategy with the intention of discrediting and collapsing what they consider to be the outmoded "rigid" system of tradition-bound Catholicism.
Pope Francis doesn't seem bothered by the confusion. Indeed, he has often spoken of the merits of "making a mess." When an Italian journalist claimed that the Pope does not believe Jesus is divine, the matter was left up to the Vatican Press Office to clarify, and spokesmen said that the journalist did not give a "faithful account" of what was said. When the journalist claimed that Pope Francis had denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus, once again, the Holy See Press Office said that the journalist was an unreliable fellow whose words "cannot be considered as a faithful account of what was actually said."
Hmm. The Pope is alleged to have made heretical statements, and the only response the Vatican can muster is, "That's not exactly what he said." One gets the impression that these are not terribly important questions either for the Pope or the Press Office. Yet, for most Catholics, these are the central questions.
A steady stream of innovations and obfuscations serve two purposes for the modernists in the Vatican. On the one hand, in Cloward-Piven fashion, they destabilize the Church, thus paving the way for even more radical change. On the other hand, each new outrage serves to distract attention from the original outrage detailed in Vigano's August 2018 letter. Francis has never answered those charges, and if his bob and weave strategy continues to work, he never will.
This article originally appeared in the December 6, 2019 edition of Catholic World Report. It is published here with permission from the Turning Point Project.
Romans Chapter 1:20 to 1:32 gives a pretty good insight into the issue
Regrettably, not a pleasant explanation
Laugh all you want, it doesn’t make your premise true.
Exactly.
There can be little question that that's precisely what he's doing today. As someone (maybe around here) said recently, "Looking for the Chastisement? This is it!"
God is simply allowing us go our way without him and its not working out so well for us.
Even agnostics and atheists are coming to the realization that a world absent of God is not a very good place to be
Chastisement? More like revelation, revealing what is at the heart of the Roman Catholic religion.
How many times will this canard be trotted out after it has been repeatedly pointed out that this is not Catholic teaching?
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Nonsense. At some level it MUST be part of Catholic teaching. The authority of Rome rests on the assumption that the hierarchy (taken as a body) cannot be wrong on matters of central importance (like dogma). If God can permit it to be wrong, then it implies that any aspect of Church teaching could be wrong due to the “’fallibility of men”. That’s a very shaky foundation to build ‘The True Church”’ upon.
The conflation of True Church and Catholic Chruch needs addressing. The One True Church is made up of ALL BELIVERS since the day of Pentecost when The Holy Spirit began indwelling believers. The Roman Catholic Church is a sham designed to use Christ to empower a hierarchy of men spouting traditions.
All I’m saying is that Roman Catholicism (traditionally) does equate itself in totality with the True Church. But IF (and this is an important IF) it is going to do that, then they must -at some level - be infallible in determining dogma and doctrine. If not, then at any point (including the early history of the Church), fallible men could pervert the teachings of Christ without repercussion from God and lead all future generations’s of men and women astray with false doctrine.
To put it another way, would Christians of all modern denominations say that God spoke to the Apostles and Early Church Fathers, but they all largely chose to ignore God AND God simply permitted them to ignore him without “righting the ship”’. It’s unthinkable if we are to maintain the integrity of teachings going back to Christ. Furthermore, it seems incomparable with God’s Providence to hold that only a small group of people through time have taught “True Christianity”, while the vast majority of those wishing to be Christians have practiced falsehood.
Paul warned that those who add anything to faith in Christ alone for being born again, that is anathema. Catholic Apologists are all over the map when one cites the sacraments as Catholic necessity to be among the 'going to heaven'. They even use the 'sin of presumption' to stear adherents from the joy of knowing in the here and now that their personal belief in Jesus as savior and Lord has them individually counted among the born again. Catholicism PRESUMES one cannot know they are heaven bound until they have been faithful to the sacraments! And even then at death they have been taught that their soul goes to 'purgatory' for final cleansing before Heaven is a reality for them.
The WORK that Jesus did suffering on that cross for them is then twisted to infer they must suffer in purgatory to be worthy of heaven. THUS the time in purgatory is infact works, to obtain eternal reward.
Salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone, with no works of suffering in a mythical purgatory to be clean enough for Heaven. Roman Catholicism is an anathema to Christ alone.
I’m very fond of Paul, but even the belief of what Paul says about Christ is based upon the presumption that Paul’s sinfulness did not get in the way of communicating the truth about Christ. Furthermore there is a presumption that EVEN IF Paul got some things wrong (for example, understating the importance of works as a sign that one possesses saving-faith), that God inspired other New Testament writers (such as James) who provided further perspective on the importance of the “fruits of faith” (namely works), and that this perspective was also included in the New Testament. In the end ALL orthodox Christians must assume that at least some faith-leaders down through the ages preserved the true teachings of Christ (either through their own free will OR because God himself intervened to insure that the true faith was not corrupted).
I meant to say “understating the importance of works”. I really wish FR had an edit function.
Looking at the state of humanity in Paul’s day, it is safe to say that much of what is said about ‘works which show one is born again’ can be seen as the behavioral changes of those to whom God has imputed the righteousness of Christ. Those who take the meaning to be ‘social justice’ type deeds (feeding the poor, clothing and sheltering the needy, etc.) miss the lengths to which Paul, and John, and Peter went to focus upon change of personal behavior.
Catholics have the most bizarre thinking on how Jesus treats His church.
He will rebuke His church as He did in Revelation 2&3 but He does not send wolves in sheep’s clothing who ravish the church to *chastise* His bride.
Besides, God has already given us instructions in His word on church discipline and how to deal with immorality in Scripture. It’s up to those who claim to follow Him to follow those instructions that He left. When your religion’s leadership starts obeying what God has already clearly laid our before them, THEN you can expect to see God act, but i don’t see how He’s under any onligation to bail you guys out as long as you continue to disobey Him.
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