Catholic Left, Catholic Right Unite in One Voice: “Only We Have the Correct ‘Interpretation’ of Papal Teaching”

George Weigel, in “First Things”:

Things That Can’t Change

The pope cannot, in other words, change the deposit of faith, of which he is the custodian, not the master. The pope can’t decide that the Church can do without bishops, or that there really are eleven sacraments, or that Arius had it right in denying the divinity of Christ. As for those “other obligations too numerous to mention,” they include the pope’s accountability to the ways things are, which is another boundary to papal authority.

Michael Sean Winters at “National Catholic Reporter”:

At First Things, George Weigel makes the case that the pope really can’t do very much, an argument he never really made when his hero John Paul II was sitting on the papal throne. His key argument is contained here:

By declining Paul VI’s suggestion about a papacy “accountable to the Lord alone,” Vatican II made clear that there are limits to what popes can do. On the bottom-line matters at issue in the two recent Synods, for example, no pope can change the settled teaching of the Church on the indissolubility of marriage, or on the grave danger of receiving holy communion unworthily, because these are matters of what the Council’s Theological Commission called “revelation itself:” to be specific, Matthew 19. 6 and 1 Corinthians 11.27-29.

Here we see, however unintentionally, the poverty of the Catholic neo-con imagination in the words "bottom-line matters." Two years of synodal discussions and Weigel wants to reduce the outcome to a bottom-line. He hurls the word "indissolubility" as if it were designed to end the discussion when a more thoughtful person might ask what, precisely, we mean by indissolubility and whether it is an either/or reality. A more thoughtful person might also point out that while the Bible certainly warns against taking communion unworthily, we all say, "Lord I am not worthy" immediately before approaching the altar, and we do so for a reason. Why is it only the divorced and remarried, rather than, say, the hubristic and pompous, who are barred from reception of the Eucharist?

I could go on, …

#JoyOfPapacy #BlueprintForAnarchy #Rome’sDividedMind