Is Pope Francis a Liberal Protestant?

First Things ^ | November 15, 2017 | Gerald McDermott

[ebb tide]

As an outsider, I can’t help but wonder whether the pope and the USCCB were particularly provoked by Weinandy’s suggestion that Jesus had allowed this controversy in order “to manifest just how weak is the faith of many within the Church, even among too many of her bishops.” Catholics will have to make up their own minds—but I’ll admit I have questions about the faith of Pope Francis, which seems, if not weak, at least different from that of the Catholic tradition.

Even before the release of Amoris Laetitia in March 2016, Francis had caused many to question his fidelity to that tradition. In 2014, the midterm report of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family recommended that pastors emphasize the “positive aspects” of cohabitation and civil remarriage after divorce. He said that Jesus’s multiplication of bread and fish was really a miracle of sharing, not of multiplying (2013); told a woman in an invalid marriage that she could take Holy Communion (2014); claimed that lost souls do not go to hell (2015); and said that Jesus had begged his parents for forgiveness (2015). In 2016, he said that God had been “unjust with his son,” announced his prayer intention to build a society “that places the human person at the center,” and declared that inequality is “the greatest evil that exists.” In 2017, he joked that “inside the Holy Trinity they’re all arguing behind closed doors, but on the outside they give the picture of unity.” Jesus Christ, he said, “made himself the devil.” “No war is just,” he pronounced. At the end of history, “everything will be saved. Everything.”

Weinandy and other Catholic critics have pointed to alarming statements and suggestions in Amoris Laetitia itself. The exhortation declares, “No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!” In December 2016, the Catholic philosophers John Finnis and Germain Grisez argued in their “Misuse of Amoris Laetitia” that though this statement reflects a trend among Catholic thinkers stemming from Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, it contradicts the gospels’ clear statements and the Catholic tradition’s teaching that there is “unending punishment” in hell. Finnis and Grisez charge that, according to the logic of Amoris Laetitia, some of the faithful are too weak to keep God’s commandments, and can live in grace while committing ongoing and habitual sins “in grave matter.” Like (Episcopalian) Joseph Fletcher, who taught Situation Ethics in the 1960s, the exhortation suggests that there are exceptions to every moral rule and that there is no such thing as an intrinsically evil act.

I take no pleasure in Rome’s travails. For decades, orthodox Anglicans and other Protestants seeking to resist the apostasies of liberal Christianity have looked to Rome for moral and theological support. Most of us recognized that we were really fighting the sexual revolution, which had coopted and corrupted the Episcopal Church and its parent across the pond. First it was the sanctity of life and euthanasia. Then it was homosexual practice. Now it is gay marriage and transgender ideology. During the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, we non-Catholics arguing moral theology could point to learned and compelling arguments coming out of Rome and say, in effect, “The oldest and largest part of the Body of Christ agrees with us, and it does so with remarkable sophistication.”

Those of us who continue to fight for orthodoxy, in dogmatic as well as moral theology, miss those days when there was a clear beacon shining from across the Tiber. For now, it seems, Rome itself has been infiltrated by the sexual revolution. The center is not holding.

Though we are dismayed, we must not despair. For the brave and principled stand made by Tom Weinandy reminds us that God raises up prophetic lights when dark days come to his Church.

Gerald McDermott holds the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School.

[ETL]

I know that this pope is a proponent of KGB-concocted "Liberation Theology", an offshoot of which was Obama and Wright's "Black Liberation Theology".

Catholics for Marx [Liberation Theology]

By Fr. Robert Sirico
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, June 03, 2004

In the days when the Superpowers were locked in a Cold War, Latin America seethed with revolution, and millions lived behind an iron curtain, a group of theologians concocted a novel idea within the history of Christianity. They proposed to combine the teachings of Jesus with the teachings of Marx as a way of justifying violent revolution to overthrow the economics of capitalism.

The Gospels were re-rendered not as doctrine impacting on the human soul but rather as windows into the historical dialectic of class struggle. These "liberation theologians" saw every biblical criticism of the rich as a mandate to expropriate the expropriating owners of capital, and every expression of compassion for the poor as a call for an uprising by the proletarian class of peasants and workers.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090321190909/http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=460782B7-35CC-4C9E-A2C5-93832067C7CD

_________________________________________________

Re: James Cone, founder of "Black Liberation Theology":

SEAN HANNITY: But Reverend Jeremiah Wright is not backing down and has not for years and in his strong stance on the teaching of black liberation theology is nothing new. He had the same things to say last spring when he appeared on "Hannity & Colmes:"

WRIGHT: If you're not going to talk about theology in context, if you're not going to talk about liberation theology that came out of the '60s, systematized black liberation theology that started with Jim Cone in 1968 and the writings of Cone and the writings of Dwight Hopkins and the writings of womynist theologians and Asian theologians and Hispanic theologians, then you can't talk about the black value system.

HANNITY: But I'm a - reverend

WRIGHT: Do you know liberation theology, sir?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354158,00.html

_________________________________________________

Obama's Church: Gospel of Hate

Kathy Shaidle, FrontPageMag.com
Monday, April 07, 2008

In March of 2007, FOX News host Sean Hannity had engaged Obama's pastor in a heated interview about his Church's teachings. For many viewers, the ensuing shouting match was their first exposure to "Black Liberation Theology"...

Like the pro-communist Liberation Theology that swept Central America in the 1980s and was repeatedly condemned by Pope John Paul II, Black Liberation Theology combines warmed-over 1960s vintage Marxism with carefully distorted biblical passages. However, in contrast to traditional Marxism, it emphasizes race rather than class. The Christian notion of "salvation" in the afterlife is superseded by "liberation" on earth, courtesy of the establishment of a socialist utopia.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090321190904/http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=30CD9E14-B0C9-4F8C-A0A6-A896F0F44F02

[ealgeone]

Yet you seem to be doing an awful lot of questioning.....and condemning as well.

[RegulatorCountry]

It appears one is entitled to do so when one is more Catholic than the Pope.

[ealgeone]

ebb can’t handle it when his own arguments are turned back on him. Which happens quite often.

[Steelfish]

You are incorrigibly foolish. The Pope’s spontaneous statements and sometimes whacky utterances do not make for Catholic doctrine or theology any more than the Rev. Al Sharpton speaks for Protestants.

Catholic beliefs are found in the Credo and in the Catholic Catechism.
Your statement that no “Pope has authority over me” is partially true. However, when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, his formal pronouncement of Catholic teachings and taken in conjunction with the Bishops and the College of Cardinals, he speaks on behalf of the Church founded by Christ. The one and only true Church.

The rest is pure fluff of the Joel Osteen or Rev. Graham variety where authoritative scriptural interpretation cannot be found and instead dissipates in the effluvia of the David Koresh’s, Jim Jones’ of this world and every other corner street nutball Protestant pastor.

[ChinaGotTheGoodsOnClinton]

He is a moderate Communist.

[detective]

No, he is not.

Polo Francis is a communist and agent of the devil.

[RegulatorCountry]

My statement regarding the Pope is entirely true. The rest of your ramblings apparently make sense to you, somehow in some way that you deemed pertinent to this discussion, but come across rather more like regurgitation from someone who wants to condemn but lacks any concrete basis from which to respond.

[Don Corleone]

Was there a quiet coup d’etat within the Catholic Church?

[Campion]

you are at a minimum schismatic if not heretic

Those words have an actual meaning. A "schismatic" is someone who denies communion with the Roman Pontiff or those in communion with him. A "heretic" is a baptized person who obstinately denies a revealed truth of the faith.

Pretty sure ebb is innocent on both counts.

[ETL]

Liberation Theology Activist: Pope Francis Is One of Us

by Stefan Farrar
December 27, 2016

BERLIN (ChurchMilitant.com) - The main figurehead of liberation theology in the 1980s is praising Pope Francis, and criticizing the signatories of the recently sent dubia.

Leonardo Boff, a main proponent for liberation theology in Brazil throughout his life, gave an interview to the German newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger in Berlin, which was published on Christmas.

Boff entered the Franciscan order in 1959 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1964, where he became a controversial figure with his prominent advocacy of left-wing causes. During his priesthood, he became a vocal critic of capitalism and a strong proponent of liberation theology.

Liberation theology is a religious movement that offers a Marxist understanding of poverty and oppression, and which had its start in South America in the 1960s. One KGB defector who later converted to Catholicism claimed it was a movement created by the KGB and spread by willing South American bishops. ...”

Lots more at link...

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/liberation-theology-activist-pope-francis-is-one-of-us

[jobim]

He’s Roman Catholic through and through, otherwise he’d not be Pope.

I didn't see the sarcasm icon on your response, but I just know you are kidding.
But can I ask about you: Are you Catholic?

[RegulatorCountry]

Ask ebb who the last valid Pope was, and what parts of Vatican II are valid.

Are sedevacantists schismatic or are they good Roman Catholics? Are not “Traditionalists” regarded in many corners of the Vatican as schismatic also?

Yes. They are.

[RegulatorCountry]

I’m saying Bergoglio is your Pope. You’re saying he’s not. Yet, it appears that yet again the more Catholic than the Pope peanut gallery sets a different standard for their rebellion than they do for the Protestants that they have now become.

[piusv]

I’ll admit I have questions about the faith of Pope Francis, which seems, if not weak, at least different from that of the Catholic tradition.

Even the non-Catholics see that he is not Catholic.

[ETL]

Pope Francis: ‘Liberation Theology Was Good for Latin America’

by Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.
Jan 27, 2017

In a controversial interview, Pope Francis has publicly defended Liberation Theology, calling it a “positive thing” in Latin America.

In his lengthy interview last week with the leftist Spanish daily El País, the Pope said that “Liberation Theology was a good thing for Latin America,” but also recognized that it had “deviations” that needed to be corrected.

The part of Liberation Theology that “opted for a Marxist analysis of reality was condemned by the Vatican,” Francis said.

“Cardinal Ratzinger issued two instructions when he was Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith,” he continued. “One very clear one about the Marxist analysis of reality, and the second picked up positive aspects.”

“Liberation Theology had positive aspects and also had deviations, especially in the part of the Marxist analysis of reality,” he said.

The two Vatican documents cited by the pontiff were Libertatis Nuntius, issued in 1984, and Libertatis Conscientia, released just two years later, in 1986.

Libertatis Nuntius addressed “developments of that current of thought which, under the name ‘theology of liberation,’ proposes a novel interpretation of both the content of faith and of Christian existence which seriously departs from the faith of the Church and, in fact, actually constitutes a practical negation.”

“Concepts uncritically borrowed from Marxist ideology and recourse to theses of a biblical hermeneutic marked by rationalism are at the basis of the new interpretation which is corrupting whatever was authentic in the generous initial commitment on behalf of the poor,” the instruction continues.

The document also noted that in “certain parts of Latin America,” the recognition of injustice “is accompanied by a pathos which borrows its language from Marxism, wrongly presented as though it were scientific language.”

The letter also said that certain Christians, despairing of every other method, turned to a Marxist analysis, “especially in Latin America.”

The 1986 text was issued as a complement to the first one, and sought to “highlight the main elements of the Christian doctrine on freedom and liberation” as a corrective to the errors of Liberation Theology brought out by the prior instruction.

In a striking revelation in 2015, the highest ranking Cold War defector asserted that the KGB had created Liberation Theology, exporting it to Latin America as a means of introducing Marxism into the continent.

Ion Mihai Pacepa, a 3-star general and former head of Communist Romania’s secret police who defected to the United States in 1978, has been called “the Cold War’s most important defector.” During the more than ten years that Pacepa worked with the CIA, he made what the agency described as “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”

He is reported in fact to have given the CIA “the best intelligence ever obtained on communist intelligence networks and internal security services.”

“Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians,” Pacepa said.

In his role as doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger referred to Liberation Theology as a “singular heresy” and a “fundamental threat” to the Church.

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/01/27/pope-francis-liberation-theology-good-latin-america/

[RegulatorCountry]

Much as FReepers once conflated conservative with Republican, you’re committing a logical fallacy. Catholic is not Godly. Godly is Godly. Bergoglio is Catholic. Bergoglio is not Godly.

[ebb tide]

Calling a Spade, a Spade

[equaviator]

How many Popes of the Catholic church have been of genius IQ’s?...I sure as heck don’t know but I think it’s safe to say that Pope Francis sure as hell isn’t.

[ETL]

WRIGHT: If you’re not going to talk about theology in context, if you’re not going to talk about liberation theology that came out of the ‘60s, systematized black liberation theology that started with Jim Cone in 1968 and the writings of Cone and...”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354158,00.html
________________________________________________________

Quote from James Cone:

“Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal”.

African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Paperback)
by Cornel West (Editor), Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Editor)

https://web.archive.org/web/20160204020447/http://www.amazon.com:80/African-American-Religious-Thought-Anthology/dp/0664224598
________________________________________________________

The Black church and Marxism: what do they have to say to each other
by Cone, James H. 1938- . Harrington, Michael 1928-1989