MS Winter’s Piece on Misericordiae Vultus is the Best Endorsement of Papal Bull Ever

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National Catholic Reporter-Endorsed

National Catholic Reporter-Endorsed

Michael Sean Winters reports on the Pope’s voluminous new Bull.

Misericordiae Vultus is the best papal bull ever. And that is no bull.

At Commonweal, Fr. Robert P. Imbelli has already called attention to the Christocentric focus of the text, which we discern in its opening sentence,: “Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy.” This is who Jesus Christ is. The essence of His relationship from the Father and to ourselves is mercy. Contra the many obnoxious attacks on Cardinal Walter Kasper’s book Mercy that have appeared, Pope Francis states that +Kasper nailed it: A Church in which the proclamation of God’s mercy is not foundational, operational and obvious is not being true to its founder.

It’s Christocentric and Kasper nailed it.  Isn’t everything Christian christocentric?

The second paragraph of the text spells this out:

We need constantly to contemplate the mystery of mercy. It is a wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace. Our salvation depends on it. Mercy: the word reveals the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Mercy: the ultimate and supreme act by which God comes to meet us. Mercy: the fundamental law that dwells in the heart of every person who looks sincerely into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on the path of life. Mercy: the bridge that connects God and man, opening our hearts to a hope of being loved forever despite our sinfulness.

Do you find your faith to be a ‘wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace?’  I find it to be a challenge and a saving grace.  Why are they constantly going off about joy and peace?  What is serenity anyway?  Isn’t it also peace?

It is hard to imagine a more countercultural cluster of sentences. At the end of a century in which humankind’s mastery over the atom was illustrative of a thorough-going dominance, after the Shoah and Hiroshima, after we became aware of mass starvation while the rich want for nothing, after all the wars and all the terrorism and all the other horrors our “mastery” has called forth, Pope Francis invites us to look to the “wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace” that is God’s mercy, not just as individuals but as a Church.

Why do liberals always think they’re brave and counter-cultural, as if they don’t have their fingers in the wind?

Mercy, for the Holy Father, is not some abstract conception. It is real, and it makes demands on us. Consider these words from the 15th paragraph:

In this Holy Year, we look forward to the experience of opening our hearts to those living on the outermost fringes of society: fringes modern society itself creates. How many uncertain and painful situations there are in the world today! How many are the wounds borne by the flesh of those who have no voice because their cry is muffled and drowned out by the indifference of the rich! During this Jubilee, the Church will be called even more to heal these wounds, to assuage them with the oil of consolation, to bind them with mercy and cure them with solidarity and vigilant care. Let us not fall into humiliating indifference or a monotonous routine that prevents us from discovering what is new! Let us ward off destructive cynicism! Let us open our eyes and see the misery of the world, the wounds of our brothers and sisters who are denied their dignity, and let us recognize that we are compelled to heed their cry for help! May we reach out to them and support them so they can feel the warmth of our presence, our friendship, and our fraternity! May their cry become our own, and together may we break down the barriers of indifference that too often reign supreme and mask our hypocrisy and egoism!

If there is any clearer rebuttal to the libertarianism that has afflicted our political culture, I do not know it. Ayn Rand celebrated indifference to others and thought altruism a great deceit. Her followers, even those who are Catholic, may not be so aggressively insistent about altruism being a bad thing, but they still worship at the god of the unregulated market, the laws of which are indifferent. Father Sirico: Call your office!

Catty!

If you call enough conservatives libertarians, then maybe you can start calling liberals conservative so they can feel better.

It is often said that Pope Francis is the world’s parish priest on account of his morning sermons each day and the way he stood outside the door at St. Anne’s Church in the Vatican his first Sunday as pope, greeting the people as they left. In this new bull, we see more evidences of his designation as the world’s parish priest. After recalling the parable of the “ruthless servant,” Pope Francis says: “This parable contains a profound teaching for all of us. Jesus affirms that mercy is not only an action of the Father, it becomes a criterion for ascertaining who his true children are.” Those may be fighting words at the next synod, but the lesson drawn for everyday life from the parable is the kind of preaching one expects from a good parish priest.

Another example of Pope Francis’ deep immersion in the pastoral life of the Church is found in his discussion of confession. He instructs the clergy:

Every confessor must accept the faithful as the father in the parable of the prodigal son: a father who runs out to meet his son despite the fact that he has squandered away his inheritance. Confessors are called to embrace the repentant son who comes back home and to express the joy of having him back again. Let us never tire of also going out to the other son who stands outside, incapable of rejoicing, in order to explain to him that his judgment is severe and unjust and meaningless in light of the father’s boundless mercy. May confessors not ask useless questions, but like the father in the parable, interrupt the speech prepared ahead of time by the prodigal son, so that confessors will learn to accept the plea for help and mercy gushing from the heart of every penitent. In short, confessors are called to be a sign of the primacy of mercy always, everywhere, and in every situation, no matter what.

Nice. Confessors ordered not to ask questions, then interrupt penitents so they can’t tell they’re sins.  It’s the ‘primacy of mercy!’

How many slogans can one Pope invent and call Catholic?

If every confessor really did behave in this way, would more people avail themselves of the sacrament? If every confessor really did behave in this way, would more people be committed to spreading mercy throughout their lives and their relationships? If every confessor really did rush out to greet the prodigals in their parish, would those parishioners be more deeply rooted in what really matters in the life of the Church?

It is hard to believe that a papal bull that is in some ways so deeply conservative, drawing on the deepest traditions and practices of the Church like confession, can be spoken in such a way that the message is fresh. This is because the Holy Father is reminding us that our faith is less about what we do and more about what God does, or better to say, it is about us only insofar as it is about Him.

It’s conservative yet fresh, instead of liberal and foul.

Last week, I spent time discussing important issues of the day, such as Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but religious freedom is not the heart of the matter. No particular requirement of the moral law is the heart of the matter. No act of justice, however noble or effective, is the heart of the matter. Mercy is the heart of the matter. It is so simple and, yet, so very non-modern. The pope’s bull does not draw on anything modern, but on the one thing that is always new, the presence of Jesus Christ in our midst. There is nothing the social sciences can tell us about mercy. There is no lawyer, nor analyst, nor medical doctor whose expertise enlightens us about God’s mercy. And, sadly, for too long the Church itself has failed to give mercy the centrality of focus it deserves and which Jesus Christ requires. This is the core of the Pope Francis Revolution. It is exhilarating to witness.

Yes, it’s all about the original Church, the one that got lost all those long, long years ago.  Nothing new here.

 

 

Pope Francis To Orders: If They’re Not ‘Forward-Looking,’ Screen ‘Em Out As Nut-Cases

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No need for balance or structure

No need for balance or structure

At the Radical Catholic there’s no reason to start glossing over the Pope’s naked contempt for the Faithful.  It’s not like it’s going to stop.

The great Vatican II is the Church in entirety!  Those Catholics who retain beliefs from the prior Church must be branded insane – and this in the Year of Mercy.

Doubling down on Cardinal João Braz de Aviz’ warning to religious vocations directors from around the world about the consequences of distancing oneself from the “great lines” of the Second Vatican Council, the following day Pope Francis gave the same group a short list of warning signs that a young person might not be suited for religious life.*

Given the state of the Church, one might be tempted to expect such a list to include, say, active homosexuality, pedophilia, theological and/or pastoral dissent, careerism, inordinate fondness of polyester pantsuits, etc. But I suspect that even considering such things as being potentially harmful to religious vocations is to have already distanced oneself from Vatican II – perhaps irreparably so. No, the real threat to religious vocations is to be found elsewhere: deep in the Freudian Unconscious. Pope Francis explains:

All the people who know the human personality – may they be psychologists, spiritual fathers, spiritual mothers – tell us that young people who unconsciously feel they have something unbalanced or some problem of mental imbalance or deviation unconsciously seek strong structures that protect them, to protect themselves.

Faithful Catholics, people who are conservative, grounded, Christian; they are unbalanced.  Ask anyone who knows the ‘human personality’ like a psychologist.  Nothing trendy about psychology, no.  It trumps all.

While insinuating mental imbalance in one who seeks structure is somewhat new – I mention only in passing his description of Christian ideology as a “serious illness” – decrying the threefold evil of ‘structures, rules and habits’ is an established trope of Pope Francis’ personal magisterium. As he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium (§49):

More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat.”

Again, is there any doubt as to who is meant here? And could the modus operandi of setting up false dichotomies be any clearer?

Why is it that every aspect of the 1970s church, which produced, among other things, the endless sex abuse lawsuits and scandals, has to be replicated today?  How many faithful vocations were subjected to these psychological screening attacks back then?

Personally I find little encouraging in the fact there are about a hundred more ordinations in the U.S. this year.  It’s still a miniscule number for a country with over 300 million people.  I know Pope Francis says he’s all about quality, but I can’t help but thinking they’ve probably become more lax in at least one key area.  After all, they’d probably have thousands of vocations if they really wanted them, not hundreds.

At his core, the place where there should be Faith and wisdom, doesn’t something seem deeply twisted in the mind of Pope Francis?  It’s almost a crushing hatred for those who obstruct his goals, a determination to succeed at their expense.  It’s the kind of force which drove the Protestant Reformation: a deranged (ideological?) mind at the helm with all the powerful establishment lined up behind him.

I hate to say it, but I don’t know what else to call it.

 

 

Is Marco Rubio Catholic or What?

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Seeking the Baptist-Mormon-Catholic Vote

Seeking the Baptist-Mormon-Catholic Vote

Mark Stricherz at Aleteia reports on the Marco Rubio announcement.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has told political donors that he is running for president, according to The Washington Post:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the son of Cuban immigrants whose rapid political ascent was nearly blocked five years ago by national Republican leaders, told supporters on a Monday call that he is running for president, according to two people familiar with his plans.

Five years ago Marco Rubio was reliably conservative.

Rubio is four years into his first term as a senator. Rubio won his race in 2010 by appealing to fiscal conservatives or tea-party supporters, cultural conservatives, and Hispanics. The mixture has made him one of the Republican Party’s top political prospects, according to Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight.com:

In part because he did so well with Hispanics, Rubio vastly over-performed most other Republican senatorial candidates in 2010, as well as those who ran in 2014.  Rubio won his race by 11 percentage points more than you would have expected controlling for the past presidential vote of the state and incumbency.

That was before Rubio became the conservative poster-boy for illegal amnesty, a wasted expense of political capital by of one of the most trusted and popular GOP leaders.

Then there’s his religion.  Is he Catholic or Protestant?  It depends on who you ask.  At one point it was rumored he began to return to his Catholic roots, but that was a while ago.  Today, on the point of his entering the GOP field for president, Stricherz picked up something from Rubio’s autobiography:

Rubio was baptized as a Catholic, turned to Mormonism as a youth, married a Southern Baptist, and has gone to Baptist and Catholic services. As reporter Lauren Markoe of Religion News Service notes, in his autobiography Rubio explained his devotion to Catholicism this way:

“I craved, literally, the Most Blessed Sacrament, Holy Communion, the sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven,” he wrote. “I wondered why there couldn’t be a church that offered both a powerful, contemporary gospel message and the actual body and blood of Jesus.”

Starting in late 2004, he began to delve deeper into his Roman Catholic roots, reading the whole catechism, and concluding that “every sacrament, every symbol and tradition of the Catholic faith is intended to convey, above everything else, the revelation that God yearns, too, for a relationship with you.”

The “sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven?”  What does that mean?  Does it work for the non-Catholic?  Why must you ‘crave’ it so, and if you do, why not go to Mass somewhere?  Catholics are doing ‘powerful and contemporary’ all over the place these days.

“every sacrament, every symbol and tradition of the Catholic faith is intended to convey, above everything else, the revelation that God yearns, too, for a relationship with you.”

So the entire Catholic faith is all about God’s yearning to have a relationship with me?  This is a man who, despite having read every page of the tedious Catechism, holds only a tangential and Protestant faith.

It’s telling how these top-tier Christian politicians can only cobble together some nonsense to express their beliefs.  Jeb Bush can’t seem to find anything the least bit meaningful to say about his Catholicism either, but at least he can be found in a Church occasionally.

Faithful Catholics need Christians to represent them in government.  If they are Protestant, at least we can support them for the elements of Faith that they share and apply.  What we don’t need are men who will play with us and feign Catholicism when they show little respect or understanding of its beliefs or evidence of its practice.