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A Return to Amoris Laetitia:The Vain Attempt to Accommodate Christianity to the Modern World and Its Distorted Values**.
At the presentation of Amoris Laetitia (AL)*, Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn famously said: “For me Amoris Laetitia is, first and foremost, a “linguistic event”, as was Evangelii gaudium. Something has changed in ecclesial discourse.” (emphasis mine)
A linguistic event? Boy howdy. Progressives love to manipulate (or is butcher the right word?) language for their cause:
- support for abortion becomes known as being “pro-choice”
- supporting banning guns and ammunition becomes known as “sensible gun control”
- supporting increased taxation becomes known as “investing”
- tolerance becomes known as “acceptance”
- you get the idea
It is becoming so in the Church as well.
- adulterous relationships become known as “irregular unions”
- orthodox Catholics become known as “rigid and Pharisaical”
- not holding to doctrine and Tradition becomes known as “pastoral care and personal discernment”
- emphasis on mercy and attention to concrete situations becomes known as “if you follow your conscience you can do whatever you like”
- a Church without orthodox leadership based on Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium becomes
Protestant“an inclusive and decentralized Church”
These are the fruits of AL. And they are rotten.
Dioceses around the world are split on what was once settled practice following from the constant teaching of the Church: those not in a state of grace (i.e., in a state of mortal sin) are not to present themselves for Communion. But that has cratered under AL. The dioceses of Rome, Malta, and some in Argentina and Germany have now broken from what the universal Church holds to be the Truth. Doctrinal anarchy is resulting from this mess.
Building on Pope Francis’s celebrated maxim that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak,” Cardinal archbishop Joseph Tobin of Newark, NJ held a “pilgrimage” for so-called LGBT Catholics at his Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart and had no qualms about his priests offering Holy Communion to those living outside of the Church’s call to chastity. When asked whether he might talk about sin during this pilgrimage he said that “That sounds a little backhanded to me.”
Not to be outdone, Jesuit Fr. James Martin, who has become a progressive media darling and a vocal advocate for LGBT Catholics said that “Pretty much everyone’s lifestyle is sinful.” Umm, no. Phil Lawler sets him straight:
That statement is outrageous. In a sane world, Father Martin’s Jesuit superiors would order him to apologize. We are all sinners; we are all sinful. But we are not all engaged in sinful ways of life.
Not to be outdone by his brother Jesuit, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, (the man known as the Black Pope as the head of the Jesuit order) has said that all Church doctrine must be open to discernment, even the words of Christ; and that the devil is just a social construct to help us understand evil.
But of course, these men have learned from Pope Francis who famously plays fast and loose with words. For instance:
No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel! AL297.
And now, there are rumors circulating for a “reinterpretation” of Humanae Vitae. Buckle up.
As with all of the “linguistic events” of this papacy, the AL secret decoder ring will be required. We will certainly hear that “the object is not to change the doctrine” because, as with communion for the adulterous, “we don’t need to change the doctrine when we can do an end-run around it.”
The jargon and gibberish of these linguistic events of the Pope Francis era certainly do seem to be a vain attempt to accommodate Christianity to the modern world and its distorted values. And they remind me of something I recently read (modified to fit this essay):
There is a lesson (here). Perhaps the dumbest man in the room is not the man who cannot understand gibberish, but the man who cannot see gibberish for what it is. And perhaps the most dangerous people (in the Church) are those who understand this human weakness and take full, cynical advantage of it. Our (spiritual) problems have deep educational roots. Until the matters of jargon and gibberish are addressed, I suspect that things are unlikely to improve.
*Amoris laetitia (The Joy of Love, also known as AL) is the post-synodal apostolic exhortation written by Pope Francis. Dated 19 March 2016, it was released on 8 April 2016. It followed the Synods on the Family held in 2014 and 2015. One can go to my blog to find critique of this document (here, here, here, here, and here)
**I stole the second part of the title from Peter Kwasniewski, at NLM. He writes on liturgy.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Moderator Note:
That was uncalled for.FIFY.
This is an outrageous statement. I’ve tried to converse with you civilly but instead you spew out garbage like this. Take your bitterness and hatred of the Church elsewhere. You are adding nothing to this discussion.
Strange that the Decree required conversion to Catholicism or expulsion. Of course, the Inquisition which followed and enforced the Decree was official Church policy… So there’s that.
I wouldn’t say something this incendiary if it weren’t true. The official NAZI policy of Anti-Semitism and the wave of it which swept across Europe didn’t spring forth from the aether. It was felt in places as diverse as Jedwabne to Paris.
The only truth being revealed here is your anti-Catholic bigotry.
Romans 13 tells us that there is no authority that is not instituted by God, so it seems counter-intuitive to believe that there is no divine role in the selection of Popes. At the same time, the basis, as I understand it, for the claim that the selection is divinely made is the same basis for honoring the emperor and all manner of other awful people.
Those under him ought to honor the Pope, but the assertion that this means that God’s selection of him means that God agrees with him has always seemed eccentric to me. God’s interaction with human authorities has always been good, for sure, but not always in obvious ways. Whether it is in the hardening of Pharoah’s heart, which was certainly not good for gentile Egyptians, or in instituting Nero’s authority, God’s kindness has often been obscure in its mechanisms.
I’m not a believer in Papal infallibility absent an ecumenical council, but it makes sense to me that some people do believe in it (indeed, if one understands Vatican I to be ecumenical, one kind of has to). The suggestion that this means that one has to agree with those absurd statements that do not qualify for Vatican I’s endorsement seems like a demand that one applauds David’s treatment of Uriah on the basis that God endorsed David in a variety of other respects.
Anti-Semitism was, of course, widespread across Europe, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and elsewhere. Before that, various Pagan leaders sought out Jews for particular persecution. Misogyny, too. That doesn’t mean that the anti-Catholic views of Hitler on racial identity are attributable primarily to Catholicism any more than his misogyny. Mussolini was more friendly to Catholicism and more lukewarm towards the Holocaust. The most seriously Catholic-friendly fascists, Franco and De Valera went further out of their way to avoid sending Jews to their deaths. Salazar actively saved Jews.
No, just as you clearly don’t under Trinitarian theology or the Holy Ghost within the Trinity, you don’t have any historical sources for your assertion. But I’ll let my unanswered question stand.
There is a very big difference between God’s antecedent and consequent will in Predestination and the direction actions of the Holy Ghost.
Oh, oh. Look what I found in Spanish on the topic.
Do you believe that God had a role in selecting Israelite royalty, Pseud?
Over at Crisis (beat ya to it @westernchauvinist), Julia Meloni has an article entitled Amoris Laetitia and the Four Last Things. She writes on one of the Pope’s “linguistic events” which I cite in the OP:
She ends with this:
One of the links in the piece yields this perfect summation:
I’m not sure if you read this article or not, but I would say it does a nice job of proving my point that Anti-Semitism was widespread throughout Europe. There were multiple instances of expulsion decrees, of which the Spanish was merely the worst and latest example, and not officially rescinded until Vatican II…
Spot on Mike. And it’s not just the Catholic Church. It’s the decline of Christian faith across the board.
Good post Scott. I’m hoping that this left turn the Church seems to be taking stops with the Francis papacy. One thing the Francis papacy has done is make me appreciate Pope Benedict XVI. What a wonderful thinker he was, and still is, I suppose. And he wasn’t necessarily a rigid completely inside the box thinker. He was able to think outside the box while maintaining the tradition and its positions.
I was just about to pull up that quote when I saw you are already aware of it. : )
You can find it elaborated upon in the National Catholic Register, here.
Thanks for the link Manny.
My pleasure.
The Holy Spirit awaits for us to listen.
Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Revelation 3:13
It is a knock, and an invitation, not a demand, to listen to, and follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
I simply renew my objection to the rehashed portrayal of the church as being steered into the rocks by the secret cabal of leftists, leaving only the faithful remnant to lament the disaster. That’s not what’s happening. The bishops aren’t trying to shape the church according to secular values; that’s just ridiculous.
As for the debate about whether Catholics are babbling nonsense about whether we trust the Holy Spirit to decide who’s pope, all I’ll say is that when you claim the pope is a disaster in the first place, that’s when you call into question the guidance of the Spirit. As it is, I think the pope is doing a solid job, so there is no need to debate who’s to blame.
There is nothing secret about it, the doctrinal anarchy in the Church today comes directly from Pope Francis. He had the Synods rigged from the beginning. He continues to ignore the dubia from the four cardinals of the apocalypse so he obviously has no intention to clear up the confusion. What does a faithful priest do today when an adulterer comes to him in Confession and says Pope Francis says I can receive communion now because my conscience tells me I can so you have to give it to me?
Many are (Kaspar, Cupich, Tobin, Malta, Belgium, etc., etc.).
To give just one glaring example: Cardinal Tobin thinks that talking about sin to the LGBT community is backhanded. How is that not bending to secular values?
Since you think the Pope is doing a solid job how is it that many dioceses are now acting like protestant ecclesial communities and making up their own rules on Holy Communion. How do you reconcile that? This isn’t a crisis of faith?
Posted for informational purposes – without further comment:
https://cruxnow.com/interviews/2017/06/21/dont-think-francis-cure-dont-grasp-disease-cl-head-says/
Allow me as an outsider to address this directly for a moment.
I think I am actually representative of a demographically large number of people in this country. Let’s call them “persuadables.” I, like many of them have parents who are lapsed Catholics, grandparents who are Catholics, and plenty of Aunts and Uncles who remain Catholic.
I am divorced from my first wife and remarried to a lapsed Catholic. Am I therefore in an “adulterous relationship”? According to conservative Catholic teaching, the answer apparently is “yes.” By all rights, if I were to come to Church (I was baptized Catholic) I would be denied the Eucharist even if I presented myself in earnest. Brief aside: this is the same Church that also can’t see its way clear to deny the host to those who are ardent supporters of abortion like Nancy Pelosi or philanderers like Ted Kennedy. </aside>
What am I to make of this situation if I am one of those “persuadables”? It seems like a no-win scenario. Face a judgmental and (frankly) Pharisaical church hierarchy who treats my monogamous marriage in a worse fashion than any given Kennedy or go off and join the Methodists?
Conservative Catholics point to “liberalization” as the reason behind the failure of the mainline protestant churches in this country. What is left unsaid in this is what they’d look like if they hadn’t liberalized. We don’t know what the results of that counterfactual situation looks like, but it seems likely that they wouldn’t be any healthier in terms of attendance today than they currently are.
Certain small, conservative sects have experienced boomlets as those mainline pews have emptied out, but they’re not exactly the Lakewood Church led by the ghastly Joel Osteen or the bizarre (yet successful) Rick Warren.
Conservative Catholics need to be careful what they wish for in this regard. You can have the Church you want, but having your cake means you might be left with nothing to eat.
posted without further comment:
In the first place, I’m not trying to psychoanalyze anyone, but in my experience, nobody really leaves the church because of a theological controversy. Catholicism is a way of life, not mere theory, and when people leave it, it’s usually because they want to live a different way of life than what Catholicism teaches.
Pardon me for making a real stretch of a reference here … but it’s been bothering me. I remember the scene in Stripes when Bill Murray confronts Warren Oates in the bathroom:
I could replay that same conversation, only including faith for soldiering. People leave the faith when they think Catholicism is only about marching in a straight line. Francis isn’t talking about that crap. He’s talking about something important. Like love, forgiveness, and mercy.
(OK, it’s not everyday I defend Francis with reference to a Bill Murray movie … but I was going for an idea there …)
Theology is important, but as someone once said, if you don’t have love, the rest is crap. And I’ll bet the house that Benedict would be the first to agree.
My parents left the Church because my Father was denied communion, if I’m not mistaken.
But it is amusing! And what, no Groundhog Day?
True. But our society has completely bastardized the idea of real love. We need the four loves. I’m reminded of when I was going through RCIA and my priest was walking through the rosary. He said, “The first three small beads signify the Trinity. These same beads also signify faith, hope, and love. Some people will say charity in place of love, that’s misguided. Love is not just erotic, we need to teach that to our society again.”
None of my business, but only to make the point that –if– he was denied communion because he was divorced and remarried, then that was because he chose a different way of life than what the Church teaches, not a debate over church teaching.