Changing the Church Not Sinners - Stop the Madness
"Pope Francis’ manifest neglect of his duty to defend the Church’s teaching in the face of grave errors urgently calls for a “tough love,” i.e., intervention in which courageous Cardinals and bishops, setting aside customary politeness and deference, frankly tell the pope that this madness must be stopped. Now."
There is a struggle taking place within the Catholic Church to stay true to fundamental Church teachings in the face of an onslaught on moral norms. Whilst the infinite power of God’s grace is a foundational aspect of Christian faith, this is now being misrepresented in a "pastoral approach" that will exclude no one from "the life of the church."
The Catholic Church welcomes us all, and since we are all sinners, instructs us on how to grow in the life of grace. At the same time, the Church, following the admonition of St. Paul, warns us that we forfeit that grace if we receive the Eucharist while in a state serious sin. Admonishing the sinner has always been reckoned by the Church as a work of mercy. We are not excluding someone from the life of the Church when we urge him to follow the moral norms that our Lord handed down to us; we are prompting him toward full communion.
It is right to place great emphasis on God’s mercy, His willingness to forgive. God is ready to forgive a repentant sinner. But He surely will not encourage the sinner to continue down the road to self-destruction.
This article by Fr Gerald Murray, presented here in full, describes the issues in stark terms and calls on Pope Francis to stop the madness.
The situation of the Catholic Church at present is one of grave disorder, due in large part to the willingness of Pope Francis to say, do, and tolerate things that no pope in history has ever said, done, or tolerated.
His recent off-the-cuff remarks instructing priests not to deny absolution to anyone who comes to Confession, for instance. This is in direct contradiction to the teaching of the Church concerning the requisite dispositions required for the valid reception of God’s pardon in the sacrament of penance.
Penitents who, for whatever reason, refuse to repent of the sins they may accuse themselves of in confession cannot be absolved. It would have seemed unthinkable that Pope Francis would say they should be absolved anyway. But he did.
He returned to this theme on his recent trip to Africa. He told the bishops of Congo: “Always. Always forgive in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.” In a similar vein, in 2021, he said that he has never denied Holy Communion to anyone.
Pope Francis wants priests in the confessional to
follow his example when they are faced with an unrepentant sinner. In such a
scenario, Confession is turned into a meaningless charade. An obstinate sinner
should never be given absolution for an offense for which he is not repentant.
His refusal to abjure his sins renders him incapable of receiving God’s
sacramental pardon.
What is the logic of absolving someone who clings
to his sins? The unholy farce of attempting to absolve an unrepentant sinner
who intends to keep sinning is a grave violation of the priest’s duty to guide
the faithful in Christ’s path of virtue and grace, not the destructive path of
sin and spiritual death. Yet that is what Pope Francis told priests they should
do
This moral laxism is accompanied by a regrettable
hesitancy to defend, vigorously and publicly, the Church’s teaching on matters
of sexual morality when that teaching is openly repudiated by Cardinals,
bishops, and priests.
Courageous defenders of the Church’s moral
teachings are unfairly vilified as ideologues, pharisees, rigorists,
propagators of rigidity, “backwardists.” Critics of those teachings, such as
Cardinals Hollerich, Marx, McElroy, Bishop Bätzing. and Fr. James Martin, S.J.
are given papal favor and influential roles. There is no meaningful papal
rebuke or discipline for their persistent campaigns to overthrow the moral and
anthropological teachings of the Church.
No one is being fired for attempting to change the
Church’s unchangeable teaching that God created us male and female; that the
only morally good use of the sexual faculty is the physical union of man and
wife in marriage, in view of propagating the human race in a faithful, loving,
and permanent marital bond.
We are incessantly bombarded with propaganda
asserting that God made some people with “same-sex” attraction and therefore He
must intend for them to act upon their sexual desires; that sodomy is as good
and holy a use of the sexual faculty as marital intercourse, and thus unions based
on sodomy deserve the Church’s blessing; that God made some people to have a
male body who are really female, and vice versa.
This intolerable wave of doctrinal error is
sweeping over the Church while Pope Francis remains largely passive and silent.
The preparations for the October Synod on
Synodality are being determined by the heterodox campaigning of those enjoying
papal favor. Instead of discussing ways of defending the Church’s contested
moral teachings, those teachings themselves are under assault in the
discussions underway.
The hoped-for result of this relentless questioning
of doctrines that have always been taught by the Church as unchangeable would
be a gradually growing acceptance by the faithful of a supposed need to
re-examine whether those teachings really are unchangeable, given the alleged
“new world” in which we are living.
Predictable claims about a shift in Catholic public
opinion (real or fabricated) will then be followed by a new “Spirit-inspired”
proclamation that Catholic teaching was in fact wrong about homosexuality and
transgenderism, etc.
“Progress versus reactionary immobilism” is the
discussion-ending mantra employed to stigmatize any and all resistance to
changing the teachings handed down from the apostles. While the progress of
error in the world may indeed be unstoppable in our time thanks to the moral
collapse of Western society, this catastrophe has no place in Catholicism.
Tolerance of doctrinal error is not part of the
mandate given by Our Lord to St. Peter, and the apostles and their successors.
If those successors fail in their duty, they inflict harm upon the faithful.
Souls are put at risk by those shepherds who teach men to love sin and reject
virtue.
It is completely beyond the power (ultra vires) of any pope, Cardinal or bishop to change the unchangeable moral and anthropological teachings of the Church. It’s false and reprehensible to claim that there are no such things as unchangeable teachings, or that what was considered unchangeable in times past can become changeable in more “enlightened” times.
We are not accustomed to a situation in which
opposition to various acts of the pope and his chosen associates is not at all
a form of disloyalty, but rather a requirement of fraternal charity flowing
from the primordial loyalty owed to God and his revelation by those who serve
Jesus Christ in the Church. When error and immorality are propagated by those
charged by Christ with refuting error and discouraging immorality, our duty is
to call out those shepherds, rebuking them with the charity of truth.
If the Church is to avoid a completely avoidable
disaster, the Synod on Synodality must not become a moment of self-destructive
questioning of the Church’s teaching on sexual morality and other contested
matters. Cardinals and bishops rightly horrified by where they see this process
leading should make their protest known to the Holy Father.
Pope Francis’ manifest neglect of his duty to defend the Church’s teaching in the face of grave errors urgently calls for a “tough love,” i.e., intervention in which courageous Cardinals and bishops, setting aside customary politeness and deference, frankly tell the pope that this madness must be stopped. Now.
Father Murray is right on all counts. . Pope Francis has lost his marbles. I have suspected this for a long time. The Cardinals who voted him as Pope are answerable to God. They must have known he was not the sharpest pencil in the box.Any Cardinal or Archbishop or Bishop who does not address these errors of faith and takes a strong stance is complicit in the Pope's heresy. He must stand down now before too much more damage is done to the Church ....Cressida
ReplyDeleteTbh churches and their leaders care to much about someone else teaching error and not enough about whether the Church is living error. I don't get any sense that the the many that don't attend church, care about whether a Priest should absolve them of their sin every time. They are more concerned about whether the Priest is qualified by their actions to be qualified to judge a person's sin in the first place.
DeleteThey don't care how many Angels can sit on the point of a needle, they want to know why so many of them, the Priest's live a 'holy' life, whether children will be safe with them. Or whether their daughters will be safe from sexual violence perpetrated by a Priest. They want to know that if they let their son's go on camp, they will come back safe and not subjected to to a perverts whipping. And generally they don't care about Papal claims to infallibility, they want to know that money given will be properly accounted for and that the man himself won't bully his staff whilst swearing at them and telling them to fuck off.
If they see something will be done to protect their young and punish the offender's, they might once more give the churches the opportunity to speak.
But I would suggest that we don't start by talking about sex, or the Churches claims to infallibility,or how wrong that other Church is.
If we do we may have blown our last chance.
Apologies for all the errors, I find that fat fingers and relatively small screens are not the best way to communicate clearly 🤣
DeleteThe foundational supernatural assumptions of Catholicism are not compatible with the material outlook of the world, which is why the Church and the world will only ever sit very uneasily in each others company. It is often said that the Church should stay out of worldly matters. I disagree with that, but could just about tolerate it if I had to. What I can't tolerate is the increasing intrusion of the world into the Church, for that's the only thing which can account for what is amounting to the treason to the clerks. It isn't that the world has no morality, it's that it has no supernatural faith, and lacking that, it's morality will always be seasonal and situational. It will change as times change. That should never be the case in the Church, and what stops it being so is supernatural faith. When you see clerics -- like the German Synodal Way, for example -- trying to change doctrine (and make no mistake, that's exactly what they're doing) then you're witnessing an absence of supernatural faith.
ReplyDeleteThe Church has always had to work with the tension between the truths that God loves us as we are, and that God wants us to repent and draw closer to him. The 'fire and brimstone' preaching of the 18th/19th centuries, and some of the more maudlin 19th century devotions overemphasise the latter, and much of modern Christianity overemphasises the former, as this video on the 'perfect as you are' heresy discusses.
ReplyDeleteSince Vatican II, the Catholic Church has - in many ways, rightly - been more open to the world and society. But, as someone put it, 'throwing open the windows' of the Church to the world also allowed the rubbish to blow in, and I don't think the Church was prepared to deal with that. This pontificate has perhaps revealed quite how much junk is clogging up the house, and it's no bad thing if it leads to a clean out, however painful and difficult that might be in the short term.
Yes agreed. For the Catholic Church the crisis started with the rejection of Humanae vitae. followed by the mounting sex abuse scandals. Secularisation, combined with failures in teaching and a rejection of Church authority, have led to Catholics ignoring established moral teachings on sex, divorce and remarriage, abortion, homosexuality and even disbelief in the Eucharist.
DeleteShortly after Vatican II, Pope Paul VI wrote a letter that remained unpublished until 2018. He had a clear impression that there is something deep and negative that is increasingly afflicting the Church. The path towards secularisation and the lack of internal unity were becoming great problems for the Church throughout the world.
The pope writes:
“… We would say that, through some mysterious crack—no, it’s not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God. There is doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, dissatisfaction, confrontation.
“The Church is no longer trusted. We trust the first pagan prophet we see who speaks to us in some newspaper, and we run behind him and ask him if he has the formula for true life. I repeat, doubt has entered our conscience. And it entered through the windows that should have been open to the light: science.”
That's a prescient quote, and I think he's quite right (having seen the amount of westerners cosplaying at Zen to fill their existential voids). The initial appeal of Christianity has historically been its ability to provide something that the world cannot give; but at some point the church(es) have largely become the world - particularly in the UK where organised Christian religion is synonymous with 'the establishment' since the CofE became the ecclesiastic branch of HM's Government (or in the USA where religion is simply an extension of one's preferred political party). People run after pagan prophets now because they're hungry for truth and they think that Christianity simply offers up more of the same delusions as the world does (see the current obsession with sexuality and gender).
DeleteIt's impossible to overstate the damage that the abuse scandals have done (which aren't confined to the Catholic Church, no matter how some of HG's communicants would have it): how can one speak with moral authority of sexual relations between consenting adults when one is covering up non-consensual relationships between adults and minors? I think going back to being an 'underground movement', as it were, would refresh the Church.
It's a time for 'back to basics' and Pope Francis should be leading this once all the poison is brought to the surface by the 'synodal' process. A time for clerical and theological discipline too. In the West, heresy is becoming more 'popular' and 'edgy' than orthodoxy.
DeleteAs it always has been. Being in the world but not of the world is not an easy task, but we're promised that the Holy Spirit will preserve us in all truth and the course will be corrected. As they say, an airplane spends 99% of its time off course, but eventually reaches its destination. It's harder to see from our finite human timescales, I think.
DeleteDoes this article reflect Jack's feelings about this pontificate?
"Does this article reflect Jack's feelings about this pontificate?"
DeleteNot entirely. HJ doesn't agree with the first part about Pope Francis endorsing sin in the Confessional. Anyone seeking God's forgiveness, not matter the challenges they face, should receive absolution. It's hard to imagine a person going to Confession, acknowledging sin but saying they will continue offending God. He does agree with the second part. Pope Francis should be acting against heretical and heterodox cardinals, bishops and priests.