Pope Francis v. St. Thomas More: Pope to Express Gifts of Protetant Revolt and Ask Forgiveness

This just in from NCR: "Pope Francis’ visit to Lund, Sweden, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation will comprise “two parts” beginning with a “common prayer” service in Lund's Lutheran cathedral and continuing with a public event at Malmö Arena that will be open to wider participation, Vatican and Lutheran leaders have announced.

"In a joint statement issued today by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, they reiterated that the Oct. 31 event will be centered on the themes of “thanksgiving, repentance and commitment to common witness".

It also said the overall aim of the ecumenical event “is to express the gifts of the Reformation and ask forgiveness for division perpetuated by Christians from the two traditions.” READ ARTICLE HERE

REMNANT COMMENT: Ah, yes, the 'gifts of the Reformation' -- such as the tearing in half of holy Christendom. The beginning of the end of the Holy Roman Empire. The destruction of the Catholic state. The loss of millions of souls who fell victim to the vile heresies of Martin Luther.

And let's not forget to ask forgiveness for the great saints who gave their lives in defense of Holy Mother Church under vicious assault of Protestant 'reformers.' Thomas More, for example, used the Greek term “anarchos” to describe the Protestant Revolt. He believed that the “whole great change of European consciousness in the sixteenth century was due to the hatred that they [Protestants] bear to all good order and the great hunger they have to make [everything] disordered.”

You see, poor Thomas More didn't think 'making a mess' was a particularly good idea. He regarded Lutherans as “daemonun satellites” (“agents of demons”), in fact, who had to be stopped before they brought civilized society to ruin.

In his book, The Life of Thomas More, Peter Akroyd explains: "This was no longer a time for questioning, or innovation, or uncertainty of any kind. He [More] blamed Luther for the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, and maintained that all its havoc and destruction were the direct result of Luther’s challenge to the authority of the church; under the pretext of “libertas” Luther preached “licentia,” which had in turn led to rape, sacrilege, bloodshed, fire and ruin."

And why not? Of the Mass of his own priestly ordination, beloved liturgy of his fathers and forefathers, saints and martyrs, for a thousand years, Luther hisses: "I declare that all the brothels…all the manslaughters, murders, thefts and adulteries have wrought less abomination than the popish Mass."

This from one who, by his own admission, was “inspired”—while on his toilet, no less—with the certainty that the Church was the great Whore of Babylon, that four of her seven Sacraments were abominations, as were her priesthood, celibacy, papacy and monastic life. On his toilet, Luther figured it out—all that’s needed is Faith alone…and the laws of Christianity be damned!

“Be a sinner and sin on bravely,” said Luther, “but have stronger faith and rejoice in Christ, who is the victory of sin, death, and the world. Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice: sin must be committed… sin cannot tear you away from Him, even though you commit adultery a hundred times a day and commit as many murders.”

Compare these words to similar ones written by the Satanist Aleister Crowley: "Are we walking in eternal fear lest some 'sin' should cut us off from 'grace'? By no means…Live as the kings and princes, crowned and uncrowned, of this world, have always lived, as masters always live… make your self-indulgence your religion…When you drink and dance and take delight, you are not being 'immoral,' you are not 'risking your immortal soul'; you are fulfilling the precepts of our holy religion [Satanism]…Is not this better than [to] go oppressed by consciousness of 'sin,' wearily seeking or simulating wearisome and tedious 'virtues'?"

Protestantism, Satanism, Freemasonry—these were but brothers-in-arms in the ancient war against the holy Church, a war fomented by agents of disorder. Even some of Luther’s friends readily admitted that the “Reformation” was anarchistic.

For example, the ex-priest Martin Bucer, who’d benefited from Luther’s moral dispensations where an ex-nun and his vows were concerned, nevertheless admits: "The whole Reformation was one grand indulgence for libertinism. The greater part of the people seems only to have embraced the gospel in order to shake off the yoke of discipline and the obligation of fasting and penance, which rested upon them in popery, and that they may live according to their own pleasure, enjoying their lusts and lawless appetites without control. That was the reason they lent a willing ear to the teaching of justification by faith alone and not by good works, for the latter of which they had no relish."

It is no wonder that Erasmus (who also advocated reform) would write: “Lutheranism has but two objects at heart—money and women.”

And now Pope Francis is heading off to Sweden to commemorate what Martin Bucer called 'one grand indulgence for libertinism" and St. Thomas More condemned as the demonic project of the Antichrist himself -- the Protestant Revolt.

I guess you Sedavacanists don't like Pope Benedict XVI either? He had this to say about the Reformation:

"For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form--the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution. It is against this background of a profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation."

— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” trans. by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989) p.196). http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/13/whos-in-charge-here-the-illusions-of-church-infallibility/

You probably won't want to hear from these either:

• Catholic Encyclopedia>Council of Constance:

The Western Schism was thus at an end, after nearly forty years of disastrous life; one pope (Gregory XII) had voluntarily abdicated; another (John XXIII) had been suspended and then deposed, but had submitted in canonical form; the third claimant (Benedict XIII) was cut off from the body of the Church, "a pope without a Church, a shepherd without a flock" (Hergenröther-Kirsch). It had come about that, whichever of the three claimants of the papacy was the legitimate successor of Peter, there reigned throughout the Church a universal uncertainty and an intolerable confusion, so that saints and scholars and upright souls were to be found in all three obediences. On the principle that a doubtful pope is no pope, the Apostolic See appeared really vacant, and under the circumstances could not possibly be otherwise filled than by the action of a general council. — http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04288a.htm

• Cardinal Bellarmine:

"Some years before the rise of the Lutheran and Calvinistic heresy, according to the testimony of those who were then alive, there was almost an entire abandonment of equity in ecclesiastical judgments; in morals, no discipline; in sacred literature, no erudition; in divine things, no reverence; religion was almost extinct. — Concio XXVIII. Opp. Vi. 296- Colon 1617, in “A History of the Articles of Religion,” by Charles Hardwick, Cp. 1, p. 10,

• Erasmus, in his new edition of the “Enchiridion,” “What man of real piety does not perceive with sighs that this is far the most corrupt of all ages? When did iniquity abound with more licentiousness? When was charity so cold?” — “The Evolution of the English Bible: A Historical Sketch of the Successive,” p. 132 by Henry William Hamilton-Hoare

• At the time of the Reformation, the Catholic historian Paul Johnson described the existing social situation among the clergy:

“Probably as many as half the men in orders had ‘wives’ and families. Behind all the New Learning and the theological debates, clerical celibacy was, in its own way, the biggest single issue at the Reformation. It was a great social problem and, other factors being equal, it tended to tip the balance in favour of reform. As a rule, the only hope for a child of a priest was to go into the Church himself, thus unwillingly or with no great enthusiasm, taking vows which he might subsequently regret: the evil tended to perpetuate itself.” (History of Christianity, pgs 269-270)

• In the summer of 1536, Pope Paul III appointed Cardinals Contarini and Cafara and a commission to study church Reform. The report of this commission, the Consilium de emendanda ecclesiae, was completed in March 1537. The final paragraphs deal with the corruptions of Renaissance Rome itself:

“the swarm of sordid and ignorant priests in the city, the harlots who are followed around by clerics and by the noble members of the cardinals’ households …”

“The immediate effects of the Consilium fell far below the hopes of its authors and its very frankness hampered its public use. … the more noticeably pious prelates [note: this the “noticeably pious” clergy] had no longer to tolerate the open cynicism of the Medicean period, and when moral lapses by clerics came to light, pains were now taken to hush them up as matters of grievous scandal.”

— .G. Dickens, “The Counter Reformation,” pp. 100,102)

In the same candid spirit is the following statement of de Mézeray, the historiographer of France: [Abrege’ Chronol. VIII. 691, seqq. a Paris, 1681.]

“As the heads of the Church paid no regard to the maintenance of discipline, the vices and excesses of the ecclesiastics grew up to the highest pitch, and were so public and universally exposed as to excite against them the hatred and contempt of the people. We cannot repeat without a blush the usury, the avarice, the gluttony, the universal dissoluteness of the priests of this period, the licence and debauchery of the monks, the pride and extravagance of the prelates, and the shameful indolence, ignorance and superstition pervading the whole body .... These were not, I confess, new scandals: I should rather say that the barbarism and ignorance of preceding centuries, in some sort, concealed such vices; but,, on the subsequent revival of the light of learning, the spots which I have pointed out became more manifest, and as the unlearned who were corrupt could not endure the light through the pain which it caused to their eyes, so neither did the learned spare them, turning them to ridicule and delighting to expose their turpitude and to decry their superstitions.”

Bossuet* in the opening statements of his “Histoire des Variations,” admits the frightful corruptions of the Church for centuries before the Reformation; and he has been followed in our own times by Frederic von Schlegel [Philosophy of History, 400, 401, 410, Engl. Transl. 1847.] and Möhler. [Symbolik, II. 31, 32, Engl. Transl.]

While all of them are most anxious to prove that the Lutheran movement was revolutionary and subversive of the ancient faith, they are constrained to admit the universality of the abuses, which, in the language of Schlegel, “lay deep, and were ulcerated in their very roots.” — Charles Hardwick A History of the Articles of Religion;

http://www.anglicanbooksrevitalized.us/Oldies/Thirty-Nine/hardwick39.htm

More: HERE

God help us, what is the matter with this man!

Good question!

Along the lines of...

...what was the matter with THESE men??

Pope Stephen VI (896–897), who had his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, tried, de-fingered, briefly reburied, and thrown in the Tiber.^[1]

Pope John XII (955–964), who gave land to a mistress, murdered several people, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife.

Pope Benedict IX (1032–1044, 1045, 1047–1048), who "sold" the Papacy

Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who is lampooned in Dante's Divine Comedy

Pope Urban VI (1378–1389), who complained that he did not hear enough screaming when Cardinals who had conspired against him were tortured.^[2]

Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), a Borgia, who was guilty of nepotism and whose unattended corpse swelled until it could barely fit in a coffin.^[3]

Pope Leo X (1513–1521), a spendthrift member of the Medici family who once spent 1/7 of his predecessors' reserves on a single ceremony^[4]

Pope Clement VII (1523–1534), also a Medici, whose power-politicking with France, Spain, and Germany got Rome sacked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Popes

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