Posted on 06/19/2023 11:11:39 AM PDT by ebb tide
On this week’s episode of The Bishop Strickland Show, Bishop Joseph Strickland reacts to an article by Msgr. Charles Pope in the National Catholic Register that discusses eight common errors present in the modern Church.
Strickland began the show commenting that Pope’s remarks demonstrated “revealed truth plus natural law and common sense,” focusing on the first two errors listed in the article.
Regarding the first error, that mercy can be given without repentance, Strickland said that “mercy without reference to repentance” is a way to deny the existence of sin. Commenting on the sentiment denounced by Pope in light of sacramental confession, His Excellency added that one needs to have a “change of heart,” and that mercy without conversion “isn’t mercy at all. It’s just fake.”
Focusing on the root of the root of the error, Strickland opined that the mercy discussed in the modern Church is “rooted in an idea of sin as just some arbitrary rules that somebody made up.” According to him, however, sin is anything that would “dismantle the human person piece by piece.”
“Sin points to what harms the human person and what harms human society,” Strickland stated. “And that misunderstanding is a lot of the misunderstanding of mercy.”
Concluding his remarks on the first error, Strickland quotes an observation that Pope made in the article, that the conception of mercy without repentance leads to the sin of presumption, a sin against hope whereby one believes that God will forgive them without the need of repentance, or that one will get to Heaven regardless of what they do.
“It’s a presumption that none [of what the Church teaches] really matters, and what God has revealed to us is that it matters very deeply, very significantly,” Strickland said.
Later in the episode, His Excellency discussed the second error listed by Pope, staurophobia, or fear of the Cross.
“The Cross is difficult,” Strickland noted. “And all of us would rather get to the reality of love without going through the Cross, even Christ Himself in the Garden of Gethsemane.”
“The will of God is to take us through suffering to the glorious gift of true love, which always is woven into that reality of sacrificial life of sacrificing, and so that we can know the reality of love,” Strickland continued. “That’s what the Cross is about.”
He further noted how St. Paul remarked that the Cross was seen as foolishness and a stumbling block to the Gentiles in his First Letter to the Corinthians, and that “we’ve got to stand by the Cross and help people embrace it as the path to everlasting life, to the Resurrection.”
To watch all previous episodes of The Bishop Strickland Show, click here to visit LifeSite’s Rumble page dedicated to The Bishop Strickland Show.
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