It's been very instructive to sit on the sidelines, watching the church of Rome self-destruct. The Francis pontificate is the immediate catalyst, but it's like a tree that suffers from heart rot. It's blown over in a windstorm, but while that's sudden, what made it vulnerable is years of internal decay.
Symptomatic is the sacrilegious (by Catholic standards) Met costume show. To get the flavor of the event:
What's striking is not the event itself, but how the Cardinal Archbishop of New York inaugurated the event while the Sistine Chapel choir performed.
We're witnessing an identity crisis in the Catholic church, from the top down. An institution so lacking in self-respect that top-level clerics play buffoons to the tune of the secular progressives. It scandalizes the laity. Scandalizes the faithful.
It's ironic to see idealistic, greenhorn converts to Rome who fervently embrace a theological paradigm that the hierarchy of their adopted denomination no longer takes seriously. Catholic leaders no longer know what Catholicism stands for. I suppose Cardinal Nolan, having seen the fate of Cardinal Burke, just wants to keep his job.
Why did John-Paul II and Benedict XVI let things get so out of hand? Why didn't they crack down? Why did they appoint known modernists to policy positions?
I suspect one reason is that it's easier to maintain the illusion of power if you refrain from making empty threats. Due to the crippling shortage of nuns and priests, even center-right popes don't have nearly enough loyal scabs to replace the gays and modernists if they go on strike. And most of the remaining laity are doctrinally indifferent.
In fairness, this has a counterpart among evangelical elites, who are just as out-of-touch with the laity, just as seduced by the siren song of the chattering class. But Evangelicals don't suffer from the same dilemma. We can replace our titular leaders. They answer to us, we don't answer to them. But lay Catholics are at the mercy of a topdown polity. When popes, cardinals, and bishops lose a sense of inner direction, the faithful must follow their lead into oblivion.
https://www.thewrap.com/rihanna-met-ball-cardinal-timothy-dolan-borrowed-miter-pope-hat/
ReplyDeleteI wonder how all those converts felt when Francis said there probably is no hell.
ReplyDeleteI saw the title and I was expecting to see a picture of the Robot!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwOJlOI1nU
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, there's a new Lost in Space tv series on Netflix. I've never seen the original Lost in Space, but this new one was okay. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. However, the robot was very cool looking.
ReplyDeleteIt's also revealing to see what conclusions some lay traditional Catholics who are not doctrinally indifferent have come to regarding the Bergoglio papacy, and even modern Catholicism itself. They have no intention of following the lead of the popes, cardinals and bishops into oblivion and are standing on the ground of what they believe is orthodox Catholic teaching.
ReplyDeleteAmong them is Ann Barnhardt, a controversial blogger who has garnered a following among Trad Catholics. Her latest column [https://tinyurl.com/yamn8jqn] titled "The Bergoglian Antipapacy: How It Happened and How To Fix It" directly speaks to what she perceives is the root cause of the current crisis: namely the entire falsity of what happened in Rome between February 28 and March 13, 2013:
>>"Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger, almost certainly despairing and very possibly coerced by the saturation of sodomites and Freemasons infecting the Vatican, college of bishops, and institutional Church as a whole, concocted a scheme allowing him to abandon his responsibilities as the Successor of Peter."
In Barnhardt's telling, this "unprecedented" decision was a disaster, because "it is an ontological impossibility to have more than one living Pope." According to Canon Law (which she cites) Pope Ratzinger's resignation "was and is invalid"... and therefore "the status quo was maintained to this day." Ratzinger has been the one and only living Pope all along; Bergoglio is an impostor who holds no office whatsoever.
The solution that will "fix" this monumental institutional problem, according to Barnhardt, is that
>> "Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger needs to be TOLD, not asked, TOLD that he is the one and only living Pope, and that this charade of a bifurcated papacy and thus the Bergoglian Antipapacy MUST END. If Pope Benedict does not do this before he dies, his eternal soul will be in dire, dire risk of eternal damnation."
This view (which she claims is becoming more popular) differs from the conclusion that some other Trad Catholics have come to who've taken the "sedevacantist" position. They too believe that there is no possible way that the heretical Bergoglio is the legitimate "Vicar of Christ". But they maintain that the "See of Peter" is formally "vacant" and has been for over five years. Some would say that it's been vacant since 1958, due to the public heresies of the Vatican II popes and that the Novus Ordo Church is actually a different religion than the "Holy Catholic Church".
From an outsider's perspective Catholicism at every level seems in utter doctrinal disarray. There are schisms even among the Catholic faithful concerning how to view their current church and leadership plight, let alone how to remedy it.
Yet in the face of Catholicism's long history of promulgating unbiblical error and protecting moral evil up to the present day, the dogma which all the factions must tenaciously cling to-- despite all evidence to the contrary--is that the "One True Church" is indefectible and under the special protection of the Holy Spirit.