Posted on 08/18/2015 5:22:20 PM PDT by BlatherNaut
A few weeks ago alarm bells went off in my head when someone forwarded me an excerpt from an English-language translation of a sermon he preached in the Pope's recent trip to South America, relating the loaves-and-fishes event to the Eucharist. Let me explain.
Around two centuries ago the liberal Protestant scholar Gottlob Paulus (1761-1851) started what was to become quite a popular trend in the heretical German circles of “higher critical” biblical scholarship. Paulus wanted to recognize some historical foundation in the Gospel accounts of our Lord’s life and ministry; but his Enlightenment rationalism meant excluding all supernatural, miraculous elements from these accounts. After all, did not every truly enlightened person now recognize that miracles are impossible, so that all accounts of them must be relegated to the category of myth or legend? Professor Paulus and his school of thought therefore opted for a “happy-medium” solution: retain the Gospel accounts as being partly historical, but demythologize them. That is, ‘re-interpret’ them – purify them! – so as to give a ‘rational’, non-supernatural explanation to the wondrous actions attributed to Jesus.
Now, other more radical German rationalists such as D.F. Strauss soon rightly criticized Paulus for inconsistency. They recognized that the miraculous elements are integral to, and inseparable from, the Gospel accounts, so that if we deny the historicity of those particular elements we should logically go on to deny the historical credibility of the entire story in which they occur. According to Strauss and his 20th-century sympathizers such as Rudolf Bultmann, we should dismiss these Gospel stories as mythical from start to finish, giving them no historical credibility whatsoever.
Nevertheless, the ‘half-way house’ position of Paulus has never gone completely out of style. For many soft-core modernists who don’t want to reject the Gospel narratives completely, it offers a comfortable compromise. And unfortunately it has invaded the Catholic academy with a vengeance in recent decades. Many readers of this article will probably have heard or read some collarless priest or habit-free nun assuring silly, old-fashioned Catholics that ‘modern scholarship’ has ‘shown’ that the Gospel miracle of the loaves and fishes – the feeding of the five thousand – needs to be demythologized. (This event was considered so important in the early Church that it’s the only miracle of our Lord’s public ministry recounted in all four Gospels: cf. Mt. 14, Mk 6, Lk 9 and Jn 6.)
There was nothing supernatural going on here, Father or Sister will assure us, no actual multiplication of bread and fish by divine power. No, it’s just that our Lord and the disciples got it wrong in thinking the crowd had practically no food with them. Thus, when Jesus started breaking the boy’s five barley loaves and distributing the pieces to those closest to him, his wonderful example of caring and sharing caught on with many others in the crowd, inspiring them to bring out their own food and share it with their neighbors, so that everyone ended up with enough to eat – and plenty left over! Catholics are often told that this is the latest in cutting-edge, ‘scientific’ biblical exegesis when in fact it is a hoary old chestnut that goes back to Herr Doktor Professor Paulus in the early 19th century.
Fortunately, the papacy held the line on this one even in the post-Vatican II chaos. Paul VI was not exactly a traditionalist pope, but when he preached about the loaves and fishes on several occasions, he never watered down the miraculous element; indeed, he explicitly reaffirmed it. In a homily at Rome’s St. John Chrysostom Parish on March 16, 1969, Paul’s exposition of St. John’s account of the miracle included these words: “With exceptional, inexhaustible prodigality, the loaves then began increasing in number in the hands of the Son of God (con eccezionale, inesauribile larghezza i pani crescevano di numero nelle mani del Figlio di Dio)”.
Alas, that was then; Pope Francis is now. A few weeks ago alarm bells went off in my head when someone forwarded me an excerpt from an English-language translation of a sermon he preached in his recent trip to South America, relating the loaves-and-fishes event to the Eucharist. It was taken off the Vatican website and included these words:
The hands which Jesus lifts to bless God in heaven are the same hands which gave bread to the hungry crowd. We can imagine how those people passed the loaves of bread and the fish from hand to hand, until they came to those farthest away.Jesus generated a kind of electrical current among His followers, as they shared what they had, made it a gift for others, and so ate their fill. Unbelievably, there were even leftovers: enough to fill seven baskets. (emphasis added by my correspondent).
Uh, oh. But was this, hopefully, just one of those “media misrepresentations” of the Holy Father’s words that conservative Catholics often plead in his defense? The Vatican’s English translations of magisterial and synodal documents are indeed often more liberal-hued than the original. Therefore, since Spanish is a language I know well, I checked out the Vatican website for the original text of this sermon. It was preached by Pope Francis in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on Thursday, July 9th, 2015, at the opening of that nation’s Eucharistic Congress, and can be found here.
Unfortunately, the boot this time was on the other foot. I was shocked to find that Francis' sermon turned out to be even more modernistic than it seemed at first sight! That’s partly because in this case the Vatican’s English translation airbrushes away some of the radicality of the original Spanish, and also because the above excerpt forwarded by my correspondent did not include some very unsettling introductory remarks a couple of paragraphs further up, in which the Pope says this:
[Jesús] toma un poco de pan y unos peces, los bendice, los parte y entrega para que los discípulos lo compartan con los demás. Y este es el camino del milagro. Ciertamente no es magia o idolatría. Jesús, por medio de estas tres acciones, logra transformar una lógica del descarte en una lógica de comunión, en una lógica de comunidad (emphasis added).
Here's my own translation of the above:
[Jesus] takes a little bread and some fishes, he blesses them, breaks them and gives them to his disciples to share with the others. And this is the way the miracle proceeds. It is certainly not magic or idolatry. By means of these three actions [taking, blessing and giving], Jesus succeeds in turning a 'throw-away' mindset into a mindset of communion, a mindset of community (emphasis added).
Now, here's the original text of the section a paragraph or two further down, the English version of which (see above) had been sent by my correspondent:
Las manos que Jesús levanta para bendecir al Dios del cielo son las mismas que distribuyen el pan a la multitud que tiene hambre. Y podemos imaginarnos, podemos imaginar ahora cómo iban pasando de mano en mano los panes y los peces hasta llegar a los más alejados. Jesús logra generar una corriente entre los suyos, todos iban compartiendo lo propio, convirtiéndolo en don para los demás y así fue como comieron hasta saciarse, increíblemente sobró: lo recogieron en siete canastas"(emphasis added).
My translation of the above:
The hands Jesus raises to bless the God of heaven are the same hands that distribute bread to the hungry multitude. And we can imagine this now: we can imagine how they kept passing the loaves and fishes from hand to hand until the food reached those who were farthest away. Jesus managed to generate a current among his followers: they all went on sharing what was their own, turning it into a gift for the others; and that is how they all got to eat their fill. Incredibly, food was left over: they collected it in seven baskets (emphasis added).
The passages placed in bold type above make it a really uphill battle to give a 'hermeneutic-of-continuity' reading to the Holy Father's sermon - a reading, that is, which would place Francis on the same page as Paul VI and (no doubt) all previous popes who have commented on this very important Gospel miracle.
In the first of the two paragraphs of his sermon reproduced above we note the Pope's insinuation (stopping just short of a clear affirmation) that the traditional understanding of this miracle – i.e., that our Lord supernaturally created new food where there was none before – depicts him as a "magician", and should therefore be dismissed by today's enlightened believers. We are left to read between the lines of this put-down of a straw man that what actually happened was a metaphorical, or at best psychological, “miracle''. Francis is telling us that Jesus' accomplishment or achievement, brought about by three actions (which significantly do not include the bringing into existence of new food out of the original loaves and fishes) consisted in changing the people's selfish, wasteful mindset into a 'communal', caring-and-sharing one. The Vatican’s English translation fails to translate the Pope’s verb lograr, which means to succeed in doing something, or managing to do it, thus communicating the idea that Jesus’ own purpose was simply to ‘generate’ this new ‘mindset’ rather than to produce a great quantity of new bread and fish by divine power. (We cannot help being reminded of Pope Francis' similarly cheap and dismissive comment, when recently addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, to the effect that we shouldn't read the Genesis 1 creation account in a literal way – i.e., the way nearly all pre-Darwinian Christian and Jewish scholars read it – because that would seem to depict God as a "magician” waving a “wand".)
In the second paragraph cited above, the words compartiendo lo propio are weakly translated into English on the Vatican website into an affirmation that Jesus' followers, as a result of the "current" he managed to generate, "shared what they had". This translation is (perhaps) open to the interpretation that "what they had" means what they had just received from the Apostles - namely, new and miraculously created bread and fish, which they in turn divided and shared with heir neighbors as more and more kept coming from the Lord's hands. But this tradition-friendly spin on the Pope's words is ruled out by what he actually said. For lo propio means "what is one's own" - what belongs to one, one's own property. So Pope Francis is clearly saying that the people in the crowd, under the 'miraculous' influence of that wondrous "current" emanating from Jesus, were motivated to start sharing their own food that they had brought along with them; and that then, "incredibly" (indeed!), there actually turned out to be so much, once all those thousand or more lunch-boxes were pulled out and generously shared, that quite a bit was left over! (And Francis, remember, has already gone out of his way to assure us that "magic" had nothing to do with it.)
Those Catholics who insist that we should at all costs give every papal statement a ‘hermeneutic-of-continuity’ reading will no doubt focus on the first words in the second paragraph cited above, namely, "The hands Jesus raises to bless the God of heaven are the same hands that distribute bread to the hungry multitude.” Taken in isolation and out of context, this statement sounds reassuringly like a depiction of the miracle as faithful Christians have always understood it, i.e., that the bread consumed by the “hungry multitude” originated physically and miraculously in Jesus’ own hands. But that traditional interpretation is plainly incompatible with Pope Francis’ preceding and following explanations, which I have set out and commented on above. If we take these into account (and also assume that Francis is not contradicting himself within a single sermon), it becomes clear that all he means by the superficially reassuring words cited above is that Jesus himself began the process of feeding the hungry multitude by breaking the boy’s five barley loaves and distributing them in a natural, non-supernatural way to those nearest to him. This then supposedly initiated the kind of “miracle” that Pope Francis tells us took place. But it was clearly only a ‘quote-unquote’ sort of “miracle” – one he takes pains to assure us was not “magic” – namely, that mysterious “current” which “generated” a new “mindset” among others in the crowd.
Thus, the ensemble of what the Pope really preached on July 9th about the loaves-and-fishes event leaves us to draw the inescapable conclusion that, along with so many modern historical-critical biblical scholars, he has taken on board the well-known, century-old rationalistic 'demythologization' of this Gospel miracle. So we are left to wonder what other miracles of Jesus he may think require the same treatment.
Of course, most of what Pope Francis says is good and true; but the same can be said of many clerics who are really ‘cafeteria Catholics’: they pick and choose what church teachings they will believe and leaves others they don’t like on the magisterial shelf. If we see a prominent leader on television wearing a shirt that has several clearly visible dirty blotches, no one will try to justify his slovenly appearance by saying, “Oh, but look at how lovely and white all the rest of his shirt is!” To defend a Pope who sometimes says shocking things by pointing to the many excellent things he also says is like that. It is to defend the indefensible.
‘Papa Bergoglio’ has made one of his major priorities clear in the title of his Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel”. But how much real “joy” will we find in “the Gospel” (singular) if “the Gospels” (plural) on which the Good News of salvation is based turn out to be a historically unreliable blend of fact and legend?
For the past 15 weeks I’ve been singing in an Anglican-Catholic choir and really enjoying it.
I’ve sung in Episcopal choirs (and done a bit of opera) before, though it’s been awhile. But here I’ve really begun to get into the drama and symbolism of the Mass to the point where the liturgy has begun to poke at my agnosticism of Jesus’ divinity a bit.
Though I still have more doubts than ever, I see now more than before, in my ehem...senior years, how greatly western civilization has been advanced through the Christian narrative in music, art, literature and even in science.
I still hold affectionately my time spent in synagogue, and yet read my Torah and Haftorahs faithfully on Saturdays. But it’s as if the whole weekend for me now...and indeed the week where I must practice for Sunday, has become tied up in Holiness.
At least that’s how I relate to it.
Shalom.
And oh...I think I see things now more clearly than even The Pope. And I never thought I’d be able to say that!
“...They are possessed by the empty desire of being talked about, and they know they would never succeed in this were they to say only what has been always said. It may be that they have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really serving God and the Church - in reality they only offend both, less perhaps by their works themselves than by the spirit in which they write and by the encouragement they are giving to the extravagances of the Modernists...”
PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS
Something’s been really wrong for 50 + years.
Thank you for that information, but I have no idea why you shared it with me. Would it not have been more appropriate to share it with a chrstian?
Because we had bandied “religion” back and forth over the years, an because I’ve always respected your take on things.
Bwahahaha. What a jokester. If I remember correctly he commented on this gospel reading not too long after he was elected and referred to it as a "miracle of sharing". He just gets more and more entertaining though. Love the "electrical current" reference. ROFL.
The liberation theology was proscribed and some of its leaders silenced by order of H.H. Pope John Paul II for trying to interpret the Gospels through the Marxist class struggle and the main tenets of an ideology that have been condemned by the Magisterium and all the Popes from Leon XIII to Benedict XVI as “intrinsically perverse” as was called by Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical letter “Divini Redemptoris”.
Even before being elected Pope, Argentinian Archbishop Bergoglio was a staunch enemy of capitalism using the worse epithets to describe its legacy to the world while exalting the virtues of socialism disregarding its horrendous legacy of genocide, misery and exploitation of those who they falsely promise to help.
Liberation Theology Triumphant as Work of John Paul II & Benedict XVI is Completely Wiped Out."
rorate caeli ^ | 9/07/14 | Antonio Socci
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3202746/posts
THE “D’ESCOTO CASE” AND THOSE WHO WANT TO WIPE OUT THE WORK DONE BY JOHN PAUL II AND BENEDICT XVI
”In the era of Bergoglio, the Vatican has practically rehabilitated Liberation Theology, which came into existence in the 1960s and has caused untold disasters, mainly in Latin America, by fostering the Church’s subordination to Marxist thought.
Over the past months there have been startling occurrences, such as the “landing” of Gustavo Gutierrez (“the father” of Liberation Theology) in the Vatican itself. A year ago, “L'Osservatore Romano” published large extracts from one of his books praising his attacks against neo- liberalism. This summer there was another highly symbolic gesture, which went almost unnoticed, in relation to Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann.“ (a Marxist Maryknoll that as Secretary of State of Castro’s puppet of the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime was relieved of his religious duties by H.H. John Paul II)
Ping
It did not at all satisfy people's natural questions about whether it was free, non-coerced, total, or even canonical. And within days it got even more garbled.
If he's not freely and entirely renouncing the papacy, why is he still dressed in papal garb? (If he's NOT still pope, it's actually improper for him to wear papal dress: white cassock with matching white cape and with white fringed sash, pectoral cross, and white skullcap)--- this may seem trivial to some, but actually Pope Benedict was very cognizant of the significance of different kinds of ecclesial dress.
What's with this novel title of "Pope Emeritus"? It's not canonical; and of course he has the right to call himself that if he wants, but the thing is, it's undefined and ambiguous, which was emphatically NOT the way Benedict did things.
Even more significant: he still wears the papal pectoral cross and,I believe, the "Fisherman's Ring." In the past, on the Pope's death, the Cardinal Chamberlain used to deface and smash the Fisherman's Ring with a hammer as a symbolic representation of the end of the late Pope's authority.
Still wearing the ring ---it seems to me --- is like labeling yourself with an ever-present caption that says, "I'm still pope!"
I mean, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the Fisherman's Ring? And I'm fairly sure I've even seen pictures of Pope Francis and Pope Benedict both in their identical Bobbsey-twins white cassocks, and Francis kissing Benedict's ring. (What the Holy Sanctus is going on here?)
There's more. Benedict still lives at the Vatican and more-or-less in isolation with the ever-present Ganswein. If he considers himself retired, wouldn't he now be what he was before, a cardinal? -- albeit a retired one? Wouldn't he move out of the Vatican, say, to Castelgandalfo?
And more: Ganswein (I don't trust him, but he's Bendeict's personal assistant / aide / spokesman / handler (?)) gave a "clarifying" (actually equivocating) statement to the Vatican Press Office saying that Benedict had kinda-sorta only half-resigned. Like he was "sharing the petrine ministry" with Francis, and Francis would be the active Pope while Benedict would hang out as the "silent partner," with Benedict in continuous contemplative prayer while Francis was doing the governing.
That's not only non-canonical, it's actually against the nature of the petrine ministry. When Our Lord singled out Peter for his role --- when He gave Peter the significant threefold charge of feeding and caring for the flock as a whole, confirming the brethren, bearing the keys and so forth, it was Peter. Not even the other close companions were singled out in quite this way. It wasn't even the usual threesome of "Peter, James and John."
There are other things that I won't discuss just now, but if you want to get just a little deeper into the tinfoil-tiara stuff, check this out (scroll about halfway down) Torch of the Faith covers some stuff that sure looks like some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion or behavior-modification or whatever you want to call it.
Is Benedict being "run" by someone? Have they given him operant conditioning? Does't he look zombiefied? Geez, it's so easy, they could do it with Ambien. Here, Holy Father, this will help you sleep.
OK, I'm done for now. Call me paranoid: but remember, as Joseph Heller said in Catch22, 'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.'
Pray for the true Holy Father, whoever that may be. I'm serious.
Pray, for Christ's sake, for the Church.
Sr Lucia:
And we saw in an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it’ a Bishop dressed in white; ‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father’.
7
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