Year of Mercy Prayer Much Like That Logo

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Molding and pasting things awkwardly and inappropriately together

Molding and pasting things awkwardly and inappropriately together

Pope Francis has composed a special prayer for his untimely Jubilee Year of Mercy.  It strikes a few of his common and somewhat troubling materialist notes.

Lord Jesus Christ, You have taught us to be merciful like the heavenly Father, and have told us that whoever sees you sees Him. Show us your face and we will be saved.

Your loving gaze freed Zacchaeus and Matthew from being enslaved by money; the adulteress and Magdalene from seeking happiness only in created things; made Peter weep after his betrayal, and assured Paradise to the repentant thief. Let us hear, as if addressed to each one of us, the words that you spoke to the Samaritan woman: “If you knew the gift of God!”

Tax collectors enslaved by money, prostitutes, and thieves are all materialistic sinners.  This message is a good one, it’s just characteristically about money and things.

You are the visible face of the invisible Father, of the God who manifests his power above all by forgiveness and mercy: let the Church be your visible face in the world, its Lord risen and glorified.

Does God manifest his power above all by forgiveness and mercy? What about by his actual power, by his creation, or by his judgments.  Is mercy first?

Can the Church be God’s visible face? Can the Church be it’s Lord?

You willed that your ministers would also be clothed in weakness in order that they may feel compassion for those in ignorance and error: let everyone who approaches them feel sought after, loved, and forgiven by God.

Can people not ‘clothed in weakness’ feel compassion for others?

Send your Spirit and consecrate every one of us with its anointing, so that the Jubilee of Mercy may be a year of grace from the Lord, and your Church, with renewed enthusiasm, may bring good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to captives and the oppressed, and restore sight to the blind.

What is the good news that Pope Francis feels the Church brings to the poor?  Is it the Gospel, or is it some kind of liberation from poverty, or as he may call it, ‘captivity and oppression?’

 

 

FrancisChurch: See No, Hear No, Speak No…Or You’re Evil!

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Who am I to judge?

Who am I to judge?

Pope Francis has often railed against ‘ideologues’ or, in his mind, people who put some lesser belief system above the Truth.  It’s a trick a generic way for him to attack a specific group of people: faithful conservatives.

The Pope actually is an ideologue because he puts his worldy agenda and biases ahead of the Faith.  It’s just that his own ideology is on the far Left, not the Right. There are no real ‘ideologues’ on the right, just Christians.  True conservatism is not ideological.  It’s simply a refusal to condemn good things from the past, a past formed by the Church itself.

Since his faith can be thin, he’s often contemptuous of the ancient Faith and those who cherish it. Pope Francis clings to physical, current realities which are concrete and solid. He sees Christianity as a radical code to overturn the ‘social’ order and upend the powerful in the world, and in the Church. Yes, the Church is part of the problem!

The Pope’s radicalism just needs to be applied for the faith to be lived.  Like Islam, his ‘Christianity’ isn’t truly observed unless it’s militant.  In that respect he is right. The Church Faithful should be militant.  If only he were preaching militancy for the actual Faith.  Instead, he appears to be a true believer in the mold of South American liberation theologist rebels, and that’s not really very Catholic at all.

In his attacks on ideologues, the Pope hopes that all men would begin to view faithful Catholics as stubborn, proud, selfish and petty, so they would then turn to his own ideology and call it the Faith.

Fr. Longenecker is here to help him.

The teacher in my screenwriting class said, “To create a believable villain you have to understand why he thinks he’s good.”

In other words, nobody gets up in the morning deciding to be just as nasty, mean and murderous as possible.

No. even Darth Vader thinks he’s a good guy, and to give George Lucas the credit for what were three pretty terrible prequel movies, at least we learned why Darth Vader is the baddie.

He was just another young guy in love, but for seemingly good reasons (to rescue then avenge his mother) he started to kill. Then he decided that he had to kill some more in order to bring justice to the galaxy. In other words, Darth Vader is an ideologue. He wants to do good, and is willing to do evil to accomplish his ends, and the greater good he wants to achieve the worse evil he may have to use.

Ideologues are bad, but religious ideologies are the worst.

The secular ideologue believes he is on the side of the right because of his belief system. The religious ideologue believes that God himself is on his side and there ain’t nuthin’ that’s going to convince him otherwise. There’s no discussion. There is no dialogue with the ideologue.

There’s a lot of dialogue with FrancisChurch that’s true.  You’d have to be Darth Vader to object I suppose.

So the problem with an ideologue is that he thinks he’s right and he thinks he follows God.  Why is that always bad?  Isn’t that true at least sometimes?  Is it possible to believe what God thinks and to do it, or must doubt be mandatory for all ‘good’ people?  How can a Catholic think like this?

The religious ideologue will slander, mock, attack, exclude, persecute and finally kill the “enemy” and think he’s not only doing the right thing, but doing God a favor.

Yes, I know, we see the ultimate religious ideologue in the monsters of ISIS.

But hang on. Blaming the other person, the other religion, the other political party, the other bad guy is exactly what makes you bad and takes you into the downward spiral of religious self righteousness.

Sure the wolves of ISIS are demon possessed monsters, murderers, rapists and bloodthirsty, angry monsters and “we hates them my precious…”

But to avoid being a bad religious person myself I have to see where I might be turning into Darth Vader.

This is frightening to me. Blame is what you do when you determine who is at fault.  You don’t need to proclaim it, but you can at least reasonably think it, yes?  If we were all angels there would be no blame.  Are we all Angels then?  Well, some of us are ISIS-like Vaders.

So in the new Francis-LongeneckerChurch I can find no fault with a person, a religion, or a political party without being ‘the worst baddie.’  I hope I don’t seem too self-righteous when I say that it will be more convenient for some people, religions, and/or political parties than others.

Father has three pages of this stuff.

Overnight it seems there is only cheap ruthless demagoguery where there once was Faith.  The gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of the Lord , how can you have any of them floating down on your head and still be swayed by this kind of false shepherding?

 

 

 

 

 

German Bishops Continue to Shut Down the Church Militant

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Play glasses on a pretender

Play glasses on a pretender

The German Bishops have just formally announced what many bishops in the U.S. would like to see; we will no longer screen ‘catholic’ employees for faithfulness.

This is generally the case already, but with this official change in Church law, the Germans are making sure that no-one ever fires or refuses to hire someone for a Catholic reason.  It’s a nightmare and it’s coming here quickly.

With potentially far-reaching consequences, the bishops of Germany have voted by more than a two-thirds majority to relax Church labor laws to allow civilly remarried employees or those living in same-sex unions to retain their jobs with Church institutions.

In an announcement Tuesday, the German bishops’ conference in Bonn said the majority of bishops had ruled that immediate dismissal will only be a “last resort” for employees who are divorced and subsequently “remarry” or those living in a registered partnership.

Until now, such employees were required to be dismissed from such employment, although the rules were often ignored. The Church is the second-largest employer in Germany.

“An automatic dismissal may now in future be ruled as out of the question,” said Alois Glück, president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, the country’s top lay Catholic organization. From now on, he said, any public violation of loyalty to Church teachings must be examined on a case-by-case basis.

As limited as his reach seemed to be, can you imagine this kind of thing happening if Pope Benedict hadn’t become sidelined?  It would be unfaithful to lay the blame of any of this on Pope Francis, right?  He’s too holy to let that happen.  It’s amazing how much he’s just like the Pope we would get if they sort of muscled Pope Benedict out, isn’t it?

The amendment, when enacted by a bishop, explicitly overturns a 2002 ecclesiastical law, which stipulated that all Church employees need to be loyal to the magisterium. Glück said the change “represents a substantial paradigm shift in the application of ecclesiastical law,” adding that the new regulation will “open the way” for decisions to be made in accordance with “human justice.”

The lack of unanimity among bishops means the new regulation is left to Germany’s 27 bishops to implement the reform in their dioceses. But in practice, it could be unlikely that any bishop will be able to resist the new measures. According to the official statement, the bishops’ conference is setting up “an additional working group” to examine the question of whether the Church’s labor law can be “more institutionally oriented” in a bid to make it a nationwide and uniform labor structure. The bishops’ conference has also instructed dioceses to publicize the changes in their diocesan newsletters. This is required to formally enact the law.

“I expect and hope this will happen everywhere,” Cardinal Rainer Woelki, the archbishop of Cologne, said in a May 6 interview with Katholisch.de. The cardinal, who headed the committee that drew up the new law, said the first objective of the amendment is to ensure “compliance with lived practice,” but denied the amendment in any way undermines the principle of the indissolubility of marriage.

Caritas Germany, which employs 591,000 staff, welcomed the change. President Peter Neher said Church institutions need a “broader understanding of the concept of loyalty” and that ecclesiastical labor law should reflect how the Catholic Church “stands alongside” those who live broken lives.

Everything is always about Caritas.

The erasure of the Faith is never an organic thing.  It’s always a top-down leveraged affair.  The Christian Faith is natural.  It functions and it lives.  Murder, on the other hand, requires some force.