Pope Francis, Catholics, and Christians in the news & Bible verses

As I am sure Mtierney would agree, if some number of women need to suffer terrible mental anguish or physical trauma or even death, it is worth it so that Christianist Nationalists can claim a victory.


Morganna said:

I'm hoping that the Church as well as our political leaders, will quickly settle the issue of allowing for procedures when there is a miscarriage and ectopic pregnancies. In a rush to legislate after the overturning of Roe v Wade. it appears that little thought or knowledge is being considered.

The Church has little or nothing to do with the politics here. May as well hope that the Church would help inform policy around migration or the death penalty.



PVW said:

Morganna said:

I'm hoping that the Church as well as our political leaders, will quickly settle the issue of allowing for procedures when there is a miscarriage and ectopic pregnancies. In a rush to legislate after the overturning of Roe v Wade. it appears that little thought or knowledge is being considered.

The Church has little or nothing to do with the politics here. May as well hope that the Church would help inform policy around migration or the death penalty.

Yeah, the fact is that the Christian Nationalists driving the anti-abortion movement couldn't care less about the Pope. They barely consider Catholics to be Christians. 


PVW said:

The Church has little or nothing to do with the politics here. May as well hope that the Church would help inform policy around migration or the death penalty.

I believe that it influences opinion. Perhaps I'm naive but I can't help but feel that if Pope Francis made a statement it would be news. Although the Church's reputation has suffered with all of the charges against it, he seems to have captured the imagination of those of us who no longer practice our faith, but who have a hope that a spiritual being could inspire.

I think of the Dalai Lama, who moves people of many faiths. Of course we vegans still have a "beef" with his unwillingness to forego animal products. (See how I snuck that unpaid political announcement in there.)


I’ve just been reading about some very sincere, and dedicated, community development and outreach work being done in Sierra Leone by Bishop Themi of the Orthodox Church. There’s a link on the St Anna’s of Gold Coast Qld Facebook page, but I’m hesitant to break confidentiality of those living in such poverty and dire conditions. 
I’m resolving to budget better, so I can manage to donate more regularly (no matter how small). August here is Focus on Homelessness month - there are things I can do to help my local community. 
And there are ways I can help support important work like that in Sierra Leone (and closer to home). No more procrastination .


Pope Francis on aging…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/world/americas/pope-francis-canada-elderly.html

from the link…

“A United Nations report has predicted that people age 60 and over will exceed people under 15 by 2050.

“Archbishop Paglia said that advancements in longevity science and medicine extended life spans by decades and created “a new population of old people.” But that also created a contradiction, he added, because a society obsessed with living longer had not changed to accommodate those of advanced age, either economically, politically or even spiritually.

“Starting even before he became pope at age 76, Francis has paid special attention to older people. In the book “On Heaven and Earth,” he said that ignoring the health needs of older people constituted “covert euthanasia” and that the aged often “end up being stored away in a nursing home like an overcoat that is hung up in the closet during the summer.”

“As pope, he appeared in a Netflix documentary on aging, and he regularly denounces the way older people are treated like garbage in a “throwaway culture.”






FYI for Catholics raised in the Traditional Catholic Mass era. What say you

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The Catholic Church’s liturgy wars are about the most essential truths of the Gospel

“In the last few weeks, acting on orders from Pope Francis, some leaders of the Catholic Church in America have begun shutting down or limiting the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). In the past month, the bishops and cardinals in Savannah, Ga., Chicago, and Washington, D.C., have all severely restricted or promised to end the celebration of this form of Catholic liturgy. It’s a stunning reversal of the policy set forward by Pope Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who had specifically authorized priests to celebrate the TLM wherever Catholics were requesting it.

“A few non-Catholic Christians have reached out to me and asked: Why do Catholic leaders hate the Latin Mass? Others have posed the opposite question: “Why do you like it?” (I’ve been attending a TLM for 20 years.)

“There are superficial answers to these questions that would be easy for most other Christians to understand. There is generational conflict in every church. Pope Francis and many of his peers were formed in a Church they desperately believed needed to modernize to appeal to modern people. Often for understandable reasons, they associated the TLM and other traditional practices with spiritual aridness and rigidity. They felt that the Second Vatican Council and the reformed liturgy that emerged in the 1970s liberated them and the Church. Younger generations were bound to question this, wishing to reconnect with the vast artistic and devotional treasury that was built around and upon the TLM, from Gregorian chant to the polyphony of Thomas Tallis and the compositions of Claudio Monteverdi and Mozart.

“That generational conflict matters, but it is built upon a much deeper conflict, which is theological. The modern Catholic liturgy and the TLM are not just two styles of the same thing. The modern liturgy is not a direct translation of the old. It changes the vast majority of the TLM’s prayers and readings, as well as much of the TLM’s ritual. And these changes implicate the most basic truths of Catholicism and Christianity itself. We often say in the church, “Lex orandi, lex credendi”: The law of prayer is the law of belief. How we worship determines what we believe.

“Broadly, there were two lines of thinking that informed the creation of the New Mass. One was motivated by ecumenism. Reformers had genuine hopes that “our separated brethren” in other Christian denominations would reunite with the Catholic Church once the New Mass was implemented. Critics of the reformed liturgy such as Cardinal Ottaviani noticed that it systematically suppressed Catholic belief in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. In this Ottaviani was guarding peculiarly Catholic doctrines from revision and change, most important among them the idea that the Holy Mass is the same one-for-all sacrifice Christ made on Calvary. As Ottaviani himself wrote, the New Mass “does not, in a word, imply any of the essential dogmatic values of the Mass which together provide its true definition. Here the deliberate omission of these dogmatic values amounts to their having been superseded and therefore, at least in practice, to their denial.”

“That said, even after the institution of the New Mass, the Catholic Church did not — and in my view, it never could — officially repudiate its doctrine on the sacraments and the Mass. And so there has been little doctrinal basis for a reunification of churches. Ecumenical hopes for the new liturgy have faded even in the Church. The Catholic Church has carried on with a liturgy that admits its traditional doctrine, but also accommodates new theologies.

“This has led a second reforming impulse — the desire for a root-and-branch reinterpretation of Catholic and Christian faith — to flourish alongside the reformed liturgy. The theology underlying this impulse is much more radical than the ecumenism underlying the New Mass, and touches not only Catholic doctrines but basic Christian ones.

“In a recent article for OnePeterFive, Peter Kwasniewski surveyed the work of Karl Rahner, a chief architect of this theology, which took the “transcendental experience” of all men as its chief subject. Rahner saw fit to completely reinterpret the doctrines of Original Sin, the Incarnation, and redemption itself. Taken to their logical conclusions, his ideas recast all the aspirations of men as attempts to approximate the good, and therefore as in some way implicitly Christian.

“We have seen the fruits of this modernist theology in the pontificate of Pope Francis. In order to facilitate the Church’s admitting remarried persons to Communion, Pope Francis elevated Cardinal Walter Kasper, whose theology held that people in stable second marriages weren’t committing adultery, but were in a state “not fully the objective ideal.” By recasting the commandments that one must obey into ideals that one more or less, but never fully, approximates, Kasper turns all sins into semi-virtues, just as Rahner turned adherence to non-Christian religions or to any other ideals into implicit attempts to be Christian. Effectively, both end up denying the sufficiency of God’s grace as the sole means of helping us follow His commands.

“Modernist Catholic theology might seem like only a curiosity to Protestants on the outside, just as the Openness Theology controversy in Evangelicalism seemed like a curiosity to many Catholics. But I would argue that all Christians should be concerned that the other communions continue to affirm basic Christian orthodoxy. And Protestants should also keep an eye on Catholic modernism because it provides a theological model for those who wish to accommodate Christianity to the secular and universalist ideologies held by the powerful. It ultimately presents a case for Christian indifference to evangelization, mission work, and orthodox belief. Taken seriously, it also legitimates defection from the Church.

“Pope Benedict XVI liberated the celebration of the old Mass because he held that there must be continuity of the faith from one age to the next, that there are no obligations that can be foisted on faithful Christians by their church leaders other than those given to the Apostles in the deposit of faith. Benedict’s view of liturgy and theology constrained the modern vernacular liturgy, by saying that the only thing it could express was the old faith once delivered to the saints.

“So, then, the questions posed above have the same answer: The reason that so many Catholic leaders hate the traditional Latin Mass, and the reason that I like it, is that it presents an obstacle toward realizing their new religious vision, which is not just questionably Catholic but effectively post-Christian.”


mtierney said:

FYI for Catholics raised in the Traditional Catholic Mass era. What say you

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The Catholic Church’s liturgy wars are about the most essential truths of the Gospel 

...

“So, then, the questions posed above have the same answer: The reason that so many Catholic leaders hate the traditional Latin Mass, and the reason that I like it, is that it presents an obstacle toward realizing their new religious vision, which is not just questionably Catholic but effectively post-Christian.”

That's from a National Review article by Michael Brendan Dougherty.

I've read his anti-Pope Francis pieces before, and this is no different.

I quoted the "conclusion", but it's obvious that this is the premise of his article, and the rest of it is a conclusory jeremiad against the Church today. And whether you call that last paragraph a premise or a conclusion, it's wrong. It's more than wrong, it's deliberately insulting.

All I can say about "Catholics raised in the Traditional Catholic Mass era" is this - my parents were married in a "Traditional Catholic Mass" because it was 1958, and I presume that Latin was the language used for the liturgy when I was baptized.  My Mom has her old missals at home, still, with the Latin on one side and the English translation on the other. However, my parents never expressed any complaint or even nostalgia for the old form of the Mass.

My Mom even embraced the new roles for the laity in the Church, serving as a Lector, Extraordinary Minister of the Eucharist, and a Catholic Chaplain in a hospital bringing the Sacrament to patients there. All of those functions being carried out by her are anathema to the so-called "Traditionalists" who write pieces like the one you quoted from.


I was baptized, confirmed, and married in 1954 in the Latin Mass. I have no strong pull either way, but having the priest face the congregation with the altar front and center was a huge improvement IMHO (not all-knowing). TLM crossed language barriers, and attending a Mass in Poland, or Berlin, or Paris, was unifying I found. We all spoke the same language!

Needless to say, I definitely see the participation of the laity in many more church roles an improvement.

If the author of the article I linked has an axe to grind, don’t we all to some degree? Was it Pope John Paul II who “opened the windows” for Vatican discussion?


The written language of the New Testament was not Latin. Its also ironic that the the mass started to be celebrated about 350 A.D. in what Jesus would have considered to be the language of the imperial oppressors.


RTrent said:

The written language of the New Testament was not Latin.

Further, the spoken language of Jesus and his disciples was not the Koine Greek of the New Testament.


For the life of me I can't understand why anyone would want to bring back the Latin Mass. I wonder in the U.S. how much overlap there is between people who want to make America great again, and want to make the Mass great again.


Jesus wasn’t Latino at the time of his birth…look how many latins named Jesus are jumping over Trumpenstein’s wall while the Texans for trumpenstein are hunting them at night… you Christians have done enough damage since you all started following a dark skinned middle eastern migrant whose father was a Jewish carpenter. You painted him white with blue eyes, you got around to following him 500 years after he was crucified by some guidos…

Lunacy 


mtierney said:

Was it Pope John Paul II who “opened the windows” for Vatican discussion?

Are you referring to Pope (Saint) John XIII, who advocated "aggiornamento"  or updating our understanding of the church and our liturgies during the Second Vatican Council?  You know, the kind of "updating" that the nostalgic, traditionalist Latin-mass-loving folks resist to this day? 


mtierney said:

I was baptized, confirmed, and married in 1954 in the Latin Mass.

1954 must have been a very busy year for you. 


GoSlugs said:

mtierney said:

I was baptized, confirmed, and married in 1954 in the Latin Mass.

1954 must have been a very busy year for you. 

The rarely achieved Catholic Rites Trifecta.


drummerboy said:

GoSlugs said:

mtierney said:

I was baptized, confirmed, and married in 1954 in the Latin Mass.

1954 must have been a very busy year for you. 

The rarely achieved Catholic Rites Trifecta.

People join the Catholic Church as adults.


finnegan said:

mtierney said:

Was it Pope John Paul II who “opened the windows” for Vatican discussion?

Are you referring to Pope (Saint) John XIII, who advocated "aggiornamento"  or updating our understanding of the church and our liturgies during the Second Vatican Council?  You know, the kind of "updating" that the nostalgic, traditionalist Latin-mass-loving folks resist to this day? 

That's it. The saying attributed to John XXIII about Vatican II is that he wanted to "“throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through.” Another comment attributed to him is that “the church is not a museum of antiques but a living garden of life.”

Both of which are virulently opposed by people such as the author of the piece Ms. Mtierney posted.


mtierney said:

If the author of the article I linked has an axe to grind, don’t we all to some degree? Was it Pope John Paul II who “opened the windows” for Vatican discussion?

He "has an axe to grind" is a mild way of putting it.  He characterizes the modern Catholic Church as heretical, so his axe is for heads on a chopping block.


Maybe my Consistency Trait is showing here, but one of the issues I have with “modern Mass attendance” is the loss of respectful attire, hats were the first item to go, and now I see men, women and kids, dressed in backyard casual, in church — even as most churches have a/c today. “Better to go to church in short shorts and flip-flops, than not go at all” is the popular comment, but , is showing respect for the occasion  too much to ask?

Perhaps going on job interviews no longer has clothing and appearance requirements?

I am indeed “out of touch’ in today’s world and that’s okay by me!

I think I am digging myself a deep hole here, by including “frivolous” issues in a dogma discussion, but the decline or lack of respect for institutions starts often with “the little things” in my experience.

What are we teaching our youth when their elders demonstrate disrespect for country, church, and civility? Mob mentality?

For every 1/6, there have been multiple events,  just over the last few years alone, of privileged destruction of the rights of others in the name of Justice.

Before anyone pounces, there were multiple and systemic crimes against humanity committed over generations past. Hitler then— and Putin now — others standing just off stage. 



Oh yes… the Mayans and the Incas …the Arawaks and the Caribs…they too have their stories to tell..  yet they’re the ones keeping your buildings of  artifacts from going out of business. 


mtierney said:

Maybe my Consistency Trait is showing here, but one of the issues I have with “modern Mass attendance” is the loss of respectful attire, hats were the first item to go, and now I see men, women and kids, dressed in backyard casual, in church — even as most churches have a/c today. “Better to go to church in short shorts and flip-flops, than not go at all” is the popular comment, but , is showing respect for the occasion  too muc

I am trying to imagine how anyone could read the New Testament and come away with the idea that Jesus wanted people to dress up for Church. 


Its rumored Jesus and disciples wore sandals.


One wonders how well Jesus would be welcomed at mtierney’s ideal Mass. Perhaps if he borrowed a loaner tie?


Mockery is the tool of the trolls — getting a slap in, just because it’s what you do best. Actually, it’s the only thing you both do. Absolutely humorless, and bringing zero into a discussion.

I don’t mind necessarily, because anyone reading your comments recognizes the struggles of the malcontents.


nohero said:

finnegan said:

mtierney said:

Was it Pope John Paul II who “opened the windows” for Vatican discussion?

Are you referring to Pope (Saint) John XIII, who advocated "aggiornamento"  or updating our understanding of the church and our liturgies during the Second Vatican Council?  You know, the kind of "updating" that the nostalgic, traditionalist Latin-mass-loving folks resist to this day? 

That's it. The saying attributed to John XXIII about Vatican II is that he wanted to "“throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through.” Another comment attributed to him is that “the church is not a museum of antiques but a living garden of life.”

Both of which are virulently opposed by people such as the author of the piece Ms. Mtierney posted.

exactly. The reason people leave the Church isn't that it isn't conservative enough, or that it's not preserving traditions like the Latin Mass, or even that people are not dressing "respectfully" enough when they attend church. The conservative backlash against Vatican II, and the centrality of the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. after Roe v. Wade are driving far more Americans away from the Church than Pope Francis's opposition to saying mass in Latin. Certainly that was the reason I left nearly 40 years ago. The church I attended was more focused on being anti-abortion and telling parishioners how to vote than in applying the actual teachings of Jesus.


Inappropriate choice of cartoon for the "Pope Francis" thread, mocking his teachings.

The phenomenon of climate change has become an emergency that no longer remains at the margins of society. Instead, it has assumed a central place, reshaping not only industrial and agricultural systems but also adversely affecting the global human family, especially the poor and those living on the economic peripheries of our world. Nowadays we are facing two challenges: lessening climate risks by reducing emissions and assisting and enabling people to adapt to progressively worsening changes to the climate. These challenges call us to think of a multi-dimensional approach to protecting both individuals and our planet.
...
To help answer that question, I have spoken of an “ecological conversion” (cf. Laudato Si’, 216-221) which demands a change of mentality and a commitment to work for the resilience of people and the ecosystems in which they live. This conversion has three important spiritual elements that I would offer for your consideration. The first entails gratitude for God’s loving and generous gift of creation. The second calls for acknowledging that we are joined in a universal communion with one another and with the rest of the world’s creatures. The third involves addressing environmental problems not as isolated individuals but in solidarity as a community.

Message of the Holy Father to the participants in the Conference "Resilience of People and Ecosystems under Climate Stress" [Casina Pio IV, 13-14 July 2022] (13 July 2022) | Francis (vatican.va)


I wonder if MT ‘s son has seen any dolphins in the New York harbor recently? Thank goodness for the liberals who run the DEP that we can now have the pleasure of seeing dolphins in the east river..

Very inappropriate cartoon for this thread of course, but she doesn’t care does she? As long as she can antagonize the local liberal boys club…she’s happy 


Oh good! Mtierney is going to teach us about trolling. This should be a master class. 

But seriously, you mock yourself, we just chuckle at the logical outcome. 


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