Posted on 05/25/2016 3:57:03 AM PDT by JosephJames
We now have a guy at the top who is propagating bad praxis.
Nevertheless, must as I respect the LCMS --- and I do, I have often said so on this forum--- I would still urgently ask you to reflect that "The severed hand cannot heal the Body."
The Catholic Church would be in better shape with you in it; and you would be --- really --- in better shape in the Catholic Church.
Loins girded and ready to fight.
That's how I see it.
My daily prayer!
But it is essential to understand that there is a difference between papal opinion and Catholic Magisterium.
It could not be otherwise. We have had 266 popes. Almost all of them, before this one, have served at times when the pope's every word, wink and raised eyebrow was not transmitted in real time 24/7/365. Therefore the vast majority of Catholics in the past could lead good Catholic lives to their dying day, without being much influenced, for good or ill, by any given pope.
At any time and place, one can and must live a good Catholic life, in intimate union with Jesus Christ Our Lord.
When it took months to get word from Rome to Oslo, not much was delivered in the papal diplomatic pouch except the kind of official pronouncements that come written in Gothic lettering and gold leaf. You weren't inundated by an inhuman torrent of human utterance known as "the pope's opinions" from our Chatty Cathy-lic Care Bear.
This is a new situation. A uniquely dangerous one. And good Catholics are only slowly learning how to stand and resist.
The last “ex cathedra” statement was before I was born, in 1950.
That doesn't follow logically at all. Scripture is of primary importance. Sacred Tradition (big "T") is of primary importance. The entire Ordinary Magisterium of the Church is of primary importance. Any time the pope is teaching these, he is teaching things of primary importrance.
You are perhaps looking for inspired novelties? God spare us from such.
And they were called out for it by a Catholic: John.
lol
But there were also other good Catholics who had learned the same much earlier into this pontificate.
Then why the heck is he in that position to begin with?
And why has he been allowed to continue in that position?
God gives us clear directions in the qualifications for church leaders. They're found in the Bible that Catholics claim the Catholic church gave us that it doesn't even follow itself.
It's an affront to the good name of Christ to call any man who claims to be a representative of Him on earth to continue in such unbridled foolishness.
And if Francis should come along and declare an “ex cathedra” statement that y'all don't like or agree with, claiming that God has given him new revelation, then just what are y'all going to do?
I’m trying to come to grips with the notion of the Pope being empowered with “ex cathedra” but never acting on it; to the contrary, it’s striking how many speak the opposite (hence this thread).
You mean the way it "explains" Genesis 1-11, Esther, Daniel, and Jonah (myths, metaphors, primitive ideas of primitive people)?
Catholics who want the Middle Ages with evolution are going to be disappointed. All this demythologization that the Catholic Church has gleefully participated in for a hundred years has led to the current crisis, and you cannot end the crisis while keeping the irreverent attitude towards the Written Word of G-d.
You need to understand something. When Catholics or Orthodox quote Paul's "antinomian" sections they mean that the Torah is now done away with. Only the Torah. Only the one and only ritual/ceremonial system to actually come directly from G-d's anthropmorphic lips. That was done away with.
Now, as for the post-Biblical chrstian ritual/ceremonial system that developed hundreds of years after Paul's death, that was never intended to be condemned by Paul (after all, he had no idea such a thing would ever come into being).
Most Protestants believe that "doing away with the law" simply means that one is "saved by grace" apart from any ritual or ceremonial. Catholics and Orthodox say it means the G-d-spoken Torah was meant to be done away with and replaced by a post-Biblical ritual and ceremonial that was created piecemeal over the centuries by human churchmen.
And to WHOM was the ‘law’ given?
Gods chosen people who were meant to evangelize the world. They might've dropped the ball on that one.
They did, but not in the way you chrstians imagine.
He was elected in a papal conclave in 2013.
"And why has he been allowed to continue in that position?"
As far as I know (and this is a hot topic for debate within Catholicism just now) a "pope" can be deposed under one circumstance only: if there was an irregularity in his election. Thus he'd be ousted on the principle that he was never "pope" to begin with."God gives us clear directions in the qualifications for church leaders."If several of the votes turned out to be invalid, e.g. if some of the cardinal-electors were actually ineligible to vote, then the papal election would be invalid.
Another possibility: if the man elected pope were actually disqualified beforehand, for instance if he had been excommunicated latae sentenctae before he was elected pope.
I'm not sure what all the grounds for such an excommunication would be, but some examples are: being a formal accomplice in an abortion, being an enrolled member of an anti-Catholic organization; obtaining ecclesiastical office through the sin of simony (payment of money). I'm sure there are more.
Canon Law states: Can. 1331 §1. An excommunicated person is forbidden.... to exercise any ecclesiastical offices, ministries, functions, or acts of governance.
Unfortunately, the Bible doesn't give us procedure for *deposing* church leaders. They'd have to be explicit and exacting; otherwise, any upright but unpopular pastor or bishop could be deposed by the Bad Guys ---the sensus infidelium --- and we'd all be Aryans or Donatists now."It's an affront to the good name of Christ to call any man who claims to be a representative of Him on earth to continue in such unbridled foolishness"
It's an indisputably bad situation. Historically, Our Lord has always dealt with such bad situations by raising up Saints to deal with it.BTW, the Pope would be brought down by cardiac arrest before he would be able to make an ex cathedra statement embodying a heresy.I've got my eye on Cardinals Raymond Burke (Knights of Malta), Robert Sarah (a Guinean cardinal,in charge of the Discipline of the Sacraments), and Athanasius Schneider (auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan--- talk about "going to the peripheries!") -- praying for them, and for whichever other saints, unknown to me, the Lord is raising up "for such a time as this."
Here's a worthwhile 2 minutes of brilliant succinctness and clarity to click on and enjoy:
Bless me, please enlighten my poor misguided imagination.
Love the Bad Catholics video. Thank you for it. I was thinking it was Martin Luther that was the hero but they made the unnamed Cardinal Pope so that couldn’t be. But I enjoyed it nevertheless.
If I were proud as a pit-hag, I could oppose the pope in a contemptuous and scandalous spirit, but my insolence would destroy any good my "truth-telling" could hope to accomplish. The key is to retain, through grace, a lowly, loyal and filial spirit, a rare attainment in these days or in any days.
If you've got a pope with wackadoo opinions, you'd better thank God on your knees that he hasn't taken it into his head to attempt "ex cathedra" statements.
People talk as if the main thing a pope does, is make ex cathedra statements, when in fact...
Infallibility is not a positive power of the Pope; it is a negative protection of the Church. Protection from what or from whom? Protection from the errors of popes!
It is a guarantee that, whackadoo as an individual pope may sometimes be in his activities and his opinions, he shall not have the power to impose them on the Church and thus draw the Church into error. (If he were able to draw the whole Church into his mistakes, that would be the "gates of hell" prevailing against the Church, which Our Lord promises will never happen.)
Pope Benedict XVI: "The Pope is not an oracle; he is infallible in very rare situations, as we know."
Pope John XXIII: "I am only infallible if I speak infallibly but I shall never do that, so I am not infallible."
Consider it done sir.
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