Catholics are resisting the Pope
I found this discussion really useful over the weekend - if you watch and wonder what prompted it, it is this - a press conference given by Michael Matt of the Remnant, John-Henry Westen of LifeSiteNews, and Eric Frankovitch of the CIC, after the CIC - the Catholic Identity Conference this year in Pittsburgh. In it, the three announce their intention to resist the Vatican/Globalist agenda and admonish Francis -- a Pope who is contemplating approving contraception, who has already approved public adulterers (divorced and remarried Catholics) receiving the Sacraments, who gave his papal blessing to worldwide lockdown, and who may well approve Catholic "gay" unions in 2023. For transcripts of each intervention, see RemnantNewspaper.com.
Sammons and Flanders do really well here examining what faithful Catholics do in a situation where the Pope is not Catholic, because that is the situation we find ourselves in. A situation where, this week, the former head of the CDF said that if Pope Francis and his agenda - which he termed a hostile take over of the Catholic Church - are not resisted, it is all over for the Catholic Church. Unthinkable rhetoric!
How do we react to Pope Francis' blatant and obvious attack on doctrine as laymen and women? How do we bring up our families in this maelstrom of confusion and deferment to secularism?
I think all that is missing from this valuable discussion is an acknowledgement that this is abusive. When studying, I always struggled with Lumen Gentium 25:
"Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking."
This always struck me as a kind of control. A sort of circular reasoning. It begs the question: "What if the bishops or the Roman Pontiff fail to witness to divine and Catholic truth? What if they enshrine Pachamamma -- a Pagan goddess -- in the Vatican gardens and bow down before her? What if the Roman Pontiff breaks with the canons of the council of Trent and says that faith alone is sufficient for receiving Holy Communion? What do we do then?"
Enshrining obedience in this way only works if we have a benevolent dictator: i.e. if the Pope is Catholic. With Francis, we have a massive problem we are not equipped to deal with. Francis knows this and is using our faithful obedience to further his agenda of dismantling Catholic belief.
The conversation between Sammons and Flanders seems to completely miss this dimension, no doubt in an effort to be loyal to the Church -- but I cannot help but point out that Pope Francis is an abusive Father who promotes villains and subverts the truth. He floats ideas which are antithetical to Catholic truth and refuses to clarify. We, faithful children, give him the benefit of the doubt, but this just gives power to the darkness. How obvious must the darkness be before we take a stand against it?
We children ask the Pope for bread and he gives us stones. No faithful Catholic can follow where he is leading us.
We must remember the Catholic Church, founded by Jesus, exists only to bring us closer to Him who is our Lord and Saviour. We have no duty or obligation to follow anyone who would lead us away from our Lord and Shepherd.
We don't follow anyone but Jesus and the Pope's job is to lead us to Him, our Lord and Saviour, not to try and convince us to leave Him!
I think the Lumen Gentium doctrine makes this reality bolder. It makes Pope Francis' worse: his lack of fealty, his lack of understanding of those he serves, his determination to innovate without proper respect or understanding of what and who he represents. God help us!
Anyway, notwithstanding that important point, this is extremely valuable:
The sexual abuse crisis happened because bishops and priests were so high on a pedestal, the laity acted as if any calling out of the problems would have amounted to the sin of detraction, which of course, in reality would not be a sin, because we are allowed to detract from a person's good name where there is a legitimate reason. It is no different here. The Lumen Gentium quote clearly doesn't envisage a heretical pope, and calling out an heretical pope, or resisting one, does not amount to the sin of detraction, nor Protestantism. An army corporal does not face the charge of treason when he does not follow the orders of an officer who has failed in his duty, and it is no different in this situation. The real problem is that there has been too much hot air from Catholics, and not enough action.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet there is still a huge discussion going on as to whether the pope is openly heretical or not. Trent Horn, who is someone well worth listening to, does a really good job of arguing he is not in this video/text where he takes common examples and looks at each one. That's not to say the pope is not causing huge problems. I think Trent tries a little too hard here and in reality the pope is in deep trouble with a lot of this stuff. Taken as a whole it seems pretty obvious that the very best one could say is that he believes in his own version of the faith. And to Trent's question of "where are the bishops calling the pope out", well there are many examples of bishops, priests, cardinals and theologians who have called him out. Nonetheless, we have to speak within the bounds of our own competence and I think it is right that we should worry about LG 25 and weigh our comments against it.
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