Saturday, December 17, 2016

“A civil war is in progress in the [Roman Catholic] Church”

“A civil war is in progress in the Church”:
“A civil war is in progress in the Church” .... The conflict was opened, consciously or not, by Pope Francis himself, most of all after the Exhortation Amoris laetitia, and today the Church is not advancing but sinking, into a ground furrowed by crevices and deep divisions.

Someone compared the failure of Pope Francis’ pontificate to that of Barack Hussein Obama. What Washington took eight years to accomplish has now happened in Rome after 3 years: the passage from the euphoria of the first hour to the final depression, having totally missed the targets that had been pre-established. Yet, it would be a mistake to read Pope Francis’ pontificate in purely political terms. Pope Francis would never have been able to pronounce Obama’s “Yes, we can”. For a Pope, unlike a politician, not everything is possible. The Supreme Pontiff has supreme power, full and immediate over the entire Church, but cannot change the Divine Law that Jesus Christ gave to His Church, nor the natural law that God has impressed in the heart of every man. He is the Vicar of Christ, but not his successor.

The Pope cannot change Holy Scripture, nor Tradition, which are the remote rule of faith in the Church, but must submit to them. It is this the impasse that Pope Bergoglio is faced with today. The “dubia” presented by the four cardinals (Brandmüller, Burke, Caffarra e Meisner) to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have placed him in a blind alley. Confronted with the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, the cardinals are asking the pope to respond clearly, with a yes or no, to the following question: Can the divorced and remarried civilly who don’t want to abandon the objective state of sin they find themselves in, legitimately receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist? And more in general: is the Divine and natural law still absolute, or in some cases, does it tolerate exceptions?

The answer concerns the fundamentals of morals and the Catholic faith. If what was valid yesterday is not today, what is valid today might not be tomorrow. But if it is admitted that morality can change, according to the times and circumstances, the Church is destined to be submerged in the relativism of the liquid society of our times. If this is not so, Cardinal Vallini, needs to be removed, for in his report given at the pastoral congress of the diocese of Rome on November 19th, he affirmed that the divorced and remarried can be admitted to Communion, according to a “discernment that adequately distinguishes case by case”. His position was made proper on December 2nd by the daily “Avvenire”, the Italian Bishops’ Conference body, according to which, those [words] in Amoris laetitia, were “very clear words to which the Pope gave his imprimatur.” Yet, can a pope ascribe to the “discernment” of pastors the faculty of breaking the Divine and natural law of which the Church is the guardian?

If a Pope tries to change the faith of the Church, he renounces in an explicit or implicit manner his mandate as Vicar of Christ and, sooner or later, will be obliged to renounce his pontificate. The hypothesis of a dramatic turn events of this kind in the course of 2017 is not to be excluded.
The choice of voluntary abdication would allow Pope Francis to abandon the field as a misunderstood reformer, charging the rigidity of the Curia with the responsibility of his failure. If this should happen it is more probable that it will occur after the next Consistory, which will allow Pope Bergoglio to introduce into the Sacred College a new group of cardinals close to him, in order to condition the choice of his successor. The other hypothesis is that of fraternal correction on the part of the cardinals, which, once made public, would be tantamount to an ascertainment of errors or heresies.

6 comments:

  1. John, your last paragraph contains some difficulties: should Jorge be able to load up the Sacred College with his boys, could that body simply allow him to proceed unchecked, turning the RCC into an Anglican-style morass? Fraternal correction notwithstanding, who is really paying attention: rad trads and sedes who already see him as an antipope; Novus Ordo and even EF conservatives who appear to have no breaking point? ISTM ole' Jorge may be seeing his position as secure, as the other group paying attention to him would be all the civilly divorced and remarried he wants back in, and even maybe the common law couples who see their skids greased by allowing the former back into communion. Perhaps the real motivation here is mere arithmetic?

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  2. Hi Kirk, I think he does see his position as secure, and arithmetic is a real part of the equation, in two ways: Bergoglio gets to stack the deck with his kind of cardinals (and bishops etc.), and also there will be less of an outflow of RCs at the bottom -- i.e., those divorced-and-civilly remarried folks who still want to hang on and be Catholic. Increasing numbers of those folks will muddy the waters for the purists as their numbers increase. Guys like Bergoglio think in terms of centuries, after all.

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    1. Do you think the common law couples will also get the green light, given their numbers? Either way, have there been any rumblings among conservative RC's about options? ISTM their theology traps them - and Jorge knows it.

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  3. Kirk, I doubt that that will happen (re common law couples). It's just too blatant at that point. I have not seen any "options" (are you asking about what the conservatives might do in response to Bergoglio?) I'm not aware of anything like that -- but it doesn't mean that there's not some policy for it.

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    1. Perhaps you are right, but if the game is numbers then, given the frequency of cohabitation and bastardy (both are the norm in Iceland) cum apparent "discretion clause" AL now gives liberal clerics, might some such couples be admitted at priestly discretion? After all, in the eues of Rome a civil divorce and remarriage IS cohabitation.

      Per options, the conservative papist must accept that everything he has been taught and believes is up for grabs, making his conservatism futile. He can either accept this and watch his clergy undo all he has learned and just suck it up, or go elsewhere. ISTM there has to be a breaking point, but, having never been a papist, am only guessing.

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  4. Kirk, I agree with you that "the conservative papist must accept that everything he has been taught and believes is up for grabs". Bergoglio has demonstrated not only how a particular dogma might be changed, but he has demonstrated the method to get the camel's nose into the tent no matter what the topic is. I believe that there is no way the progressives will want to roll back the progress, and that the conservatives cannot possibly let this happen. Maybe they can live with the tension [in the name of being "catholic"], as they've done since Vatican II, but it's certainly a more pronounced tension than they lived with just three years ago.

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