On Corpus Christi Pope Francis Disturbs

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Not repentance, Confession, and Jesus all rolled into one

Repentance, Confession, and Jesus all rolled into one?

In honor of Corpus Christi, Pope Francis spoke about the Holy Eucharist.  As usual he said some uplifting things but, true to form, some of the things he said were unsettling, some were disturbing, and some were jarring.

We are accustomed to being wary now.  We can’t just assume Pope Francis is presenting us with Catholicism when he speaks, can we?

The Eucharist is the seal of God’s covenant, uniting Christians and giving them the strength to bring God’s love to others, even when faith carries a high price, Pope Francis has said.

The Eucharist does give us strength to love others, even when faith carries a high price, but is it really a ‘seal of God’s covenant?’  I thought it was God Himself.

Does Communion unite Christians with each other, or does receiving Him unite us all with Christ?

Celebrating the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ with an evening Mass outside Rome’s Basilica of St John Lateran, Pope Francis said the church and its members will never cease being in awe of the Eucharist.

Is this not something we can take as a given, since God is awesome?

Pope Francis asked the faithful as they walked through the city with the Eucharist to remember “our many brothers and sisters who do not have the freedom to express their faith in the Lord Jesus”.

This is true.  The freedom to process through the streets is a great and necessary thing.  I wish more of us felt free and willing to do so.

“Let us be united with them; let us sing with them, praise with them, adore with them,” he said. “And, in our hearts, let us venerate those brothers and sisters who were asked to sacrifice their lives out of fidelity to Christ. May their blood, united to the Lord’s, be a pledge of peace and reconciliation for the whole world.”

The Pope has made it clear before that by ‘martyrs’ he means anyone killed for professing Christ, not just Catholics.  The vast majority of those murdered for Christianity lately are not Roman Catholics.  Is their blood united to the Lord’s?  How much heresy and sin would a murdered ‘christian’ have to embrace before there was some disunity?

How can the deaths of Christians at the hands of Muslims be “pledges of peace and reconciliation for the whole world?”  A death is not a pledge.  Are peace and reconciliation God’s goals in a world full of sin and evil?  Perhaps first He wants faith and obedience.

I would imagine those killed might hope someone would pledge to defeat ISIS through military campaigns, because they know first-hand that it would bring peace and safety for others like themselves.  Most people brave and faithful enough to die for the name of Christ also know what peace really entails.

The Eucharist, he said, “sanctifies us, purifies us and unites us in a marvellous communion with God. In that way we learn that the Eucharist is not a prize for the good, but strength for the weak; for sinners it is pardon; it is the viaticum that helps us move forward, to walk.”

Does the Eucharist purify us?  What if we aren’t repentant?  What if we haven’t made a good Confession?  What good Catholic would consider the Eucharist his ‘prize’ anyway?  Why does the Pope employ strawmen?

Is the Eucharist pardon for the sinner?  Are the Last Rites administered without Confession?  Holy Communion is certainly a manifestation of God’s Mercy since He comes to us and heals us, giving us strength.  But it’s dangerous, particularly now, to give the impression that Communion is a time for forgiveness of sins.  That is what happens for the repentant sinner during Confession. Then, purified through the mercy of God and his Church, the good person can be strengthened and healed by union with Our Lord Himself.

Union with God entails a certain effort on our part, because God is holy.

 

 

 

 

Cardinal Pell Gets the O’Malley Evil Eye

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Sending out psychic drones

Sending out psychic drones?

Things are looking grim and ominous for Cardinal Pell, high-level curial reformer yet famous defender of the Faith at that heresy-laden Synod on the Family.  He appears to be getting the evil eye from Cardinal O’Malley, the man in charge of those caustic pro-gay professional victims who are spreading their hate from within the offices of the Church itself.

Jean-Louis De La Vaissiere writes:

External experts brought in by Pope Francis to help tackle the tiny city state’s ills are answering the papal call for openness — and infuriating some Holy See stalwarts in the process.

Over the past few months members of the pope’s commission for child protection — handpicked by Francis to help root out sex abuse in the Catholic Church — have publicly attacked a cardinal and a bishop.

The cardinal in question is the Vatican’s finance chief George Pell, who was accused by commissioner Peter Saunders of being an “almost sociopathic” man who covered up abuse and tried to buy the silence of at least one victim.

Australian Pell, who was described by Saunders as “a massive, massive thorn in the side of Pope Francis’s papacy”, threatened legal action and was defended by the Vatican, who stressed Saunders was only expressing his personal views.

Despite the anger among red hats in the gilded corridors of Saint Peter’s, Saunders — a British child abuse victim — stood his ground and has not apologised.

The anti-paedophilia body has strong ties to survivor groups who are highly critical of the Vatican, and its members readily draw attention to the Church’s flaws, even if it embarrasses the very man who appointed them.

These newly empowered survivor groups are plain enemies of the Church and priests.

Now the office run by Cardinal O’Malley, the most senior man at the Vatican appointed to handle such matters, has issued a statement calling on Cardinal Pell to respond directly and promptly.

It was Curial Gang of Nine’s O’Malley who signaled the doom of targeted K.C. Bishop Finn several months before his ultimate resignation.

“The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, as mandated by the Holy Father, Pope Francis, has no jurisdiction to comment on individual cases or inquiries,” the statement issued yesterday evening reads. “Regarding Australia’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Institutional Child Sex Abuse, all appropriate questions are being dealt with by the Truth, Justice and Healing Council in Australia, which is coordinating the local Church’s response to the Royal Commission’s findings,” the statement says. “The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors remains dedicated to its mission as outlined in the recently approved provisional Statutes, which is to help the Church worldwide protect minors and make certain that the interests of abuse survivors and victims’ are paramount. To this ends the Commission considers it essential that those in positions of authority in the Church respond promptly, transparently and with the clear intent of enabling justice to be achieved.”

Just like FrancisChurch has done with Bishop Finn, with the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and with other good bishops in South America, Italy, now Belgium; they are muscled aside in the name of murky or overblown scandals.

Meanwhile there’s almost nothing the liberal friends of Francis can do to lose their exalted positions in the Church today.

See here,

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see here.

 

 

Pope Francis Is Confused About St. Francis

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Loved for his holiness, not his hipster agenda

Loved for his holiness not his hipster agenda

At Crisis Samuel Gregg counters the accumulated image of a saccharine St. Francis who gave his life to the poor.  People are hijacking St. Francis, using his name for their own less-than-Christlike agendas.

Such ideas about Saint Francis don’t fit well with some portrayals of the medieval hermit and friar that have emerged in recent decades. Many of these have been developed, as illustrated by the doyen of Italian historians of Francis and the Franciscan movement, Grado G. Merlo, to exploit Francis for numerous contemporary religious and political agendas, ranging from pacifism to radical environmentalism. Franco Zefferelli’s well-known 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon presented the saint, for example, as a type of winsome eccentric who was all about shattering conventionality. In his 1982 book Francis of Assisi: A Model of Human Liberation, the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff portrayed Francis as one who, conceptually speaking, would help us move away from a world dominated by “the bourgeois class that has directed our history for the past five hundred years.”

Leo Boff is one of the many rehabilitated Marxist pseudo-Catholic thinkers in the Pope FrancisEra.

So what are some aspects of Saint Francis’s life detailed in Thompson’s book that will surprise many? One is that although he sought radical detachment from the world, Francis believed that he and his followers should engage in manual labor in order to procure necessities like food. Begging was always a secondary alternative (29). Another is that Francis thought that the Church’s sacramental life required careful preparation, use of the finest sacred vessels (32), and proper vestments (62). This is consistent with Francis’s conviction that one’s most direct contact with God was in the Mass, “not in nature or even in service to the poor” (61). While Francis is rightly called a peacemaker and one who loved the poor, Thompson stresses the saint’s “absolute lack of any program of legal or social reforms” (37). The word “poverty” itself appears rarely in Francis’s own writing (246). It seems Francis also thought that it was absolute rather than relative poverty which “always had a claim on compassion” (40).

When it came to Catholic dogma and doctrine, Francis was no proto-dissenter. He was, as Thompson puts it, “fiercely orthodox” (41), even insisting in later life that friars guilty of liturgical abuses or dogmatic deviations should be remanded to higher church authorities (135-136). Hence it shouldn’t surprise us that Francis’s famous conversation in Egypt in 1219 with Sultan al-Kamil and his advisors wasn’t an exercise in interfaith pleasantries. While Francis certainly did not mock Islam, the saint politely told his Muslim interlocutors that he was there to explicate the truth of the Christian faith and save the sultan’s soul (66-70). Nothing more, nothing less.

Francis is of course especially remembered by Christians and others for his love of nature, so much so that another saint, John Paul II, proclaimed him the patron saint of “those who promote ecology” in his 1979 Bula Inter sanctos. Francis’s deep affinity with nature and animals was underscored by those who knew him. The killing of animals or seeing them suffer upset him deeply (56). In this regard and many others, Francis didn’t see the natural world and animals as things to be feared or treated solely as resources for use (57).

Unlike many other medieval religious reformers, however, Francis rejected abstinence from meat and wasn’t a vegetarian. Nor was there a trace of pantheism in Francis’s conception of nature (56). Francis’s references and allusions to nature in his writings, preaching, and instruction were overwhelmingly drawn from the scriptures rather than the environment itself (55). More generally, Francis saw the beauty in nature and the animal world as something that should lead to worship and praise of God (58)—not things to be invested with god-like qualities. G.K. Chesterton’s 1923 popular biography of Francis makes a similar point: though he loved nature, Francis never worshipped nature itself. Francis’s relationship to nature, Thompson observes, shouldn’t be romanticized. The saint even viewed vermin and mice, for example, as “agents of the devil” (225).

Francis is a saint because he was faithful.  He lived the Gospel so closely that Our Lord granted him countless miracles including imprinting him with His own stigmata.  He was poor as a discipline, as a sacrifice, and example.

Francis’s goal was souls.  His was the work of God.  His mission was to rebuild the Church, not tear it down or make it into something profane.

He was no liberation theologist, trying to take over the world by demonizing the wealthy, overturning the social order, and flouting the natural laws in the name of the poor.  He threw all that materialism aside when he was quite young and picked up the cross of Christ.