Sunday, November 02, 2014

"No, Newman cannot be used to defend Kasper"

Fr. Richard G. Cipolla, DPhil, "No, Newman cannot be used to defend Kasper" (RC, November 1, 2014):
Fr. Robert Barron suggests elsewhere that Cardinal Kasper’s proposition to allow divorced and "remarried" Catholics to receive Holy Communion in the name of mercy should be judged by the criteria that Blessed John Henry Newman developed in his Essay on the Development of Doctrine. Cardinal Kasper would in intellectual honesty have to respond to Fr. Barron that Newman’s criteria have nothing to do with his proposition.  He would respond that he is not advocating changing the Church’s teaching, the doctrine on the indissolubility of marriage and its sacramentality.  He is advocating a change in pastoral practice on behalf of those who are divorced and "remarried" Catholics to receive Holy Communion.

Change in pastoral practice has nothing to do with Newman’s understanding of development of doctrine.  If Newman were with us today, he would tell us that what is going on is the ever encroaching of that “liberalism in religion” that he so strenuously fought against his whole life, as an Anglican and then as a Catholic.  Cardinal Kasper is the first to affirm, very often, that he fully supports the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage based on Jesus’ own clear words in the Gospel of Matthew.  What he is proposing is a change in pastoral practice that would essentially, according to common sense, absolutely contradict the Church’s teaching on the Sacraments of Marriage, Penance, and the Eucharist. 

This has nothing to do with development of doctrine.  It has everything to do with a violation of the principle of non-contradiction and the cynical cleavage advocated between doctrine and praxis.  For this enterprise, Newman cannot be invoked as a possible support.   
He would be, and is, shocked by the thought.

Fr. Richard G. Cipolla, DPhil

[Hat tip to JM]

8 comments:

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

M.J. was one of the many unfortunate fools who tried to claim that Our Pope and Our Cross could change discipline without draining substance from Christ's teaching about the the Doctrine of Divorce and Remarriage.

Well, M.J. got better.

But from his initial Angelus, The Bishop of Rome has been determined to find a way to allow for the Church to dispense Communion to the Divorced and Remarried and he rigged the Synod to deliver this permission but his conspiratorial coup was exposed and he was humiliated and was constrained to deliver a largely political speech to close the Synod but he has not changed his revolutionary plans.

Look, he does not need the votes of the Synod; as he pointed-out to the majority of the Hierarchy who are already in favor of communion for the divorced and remarried, he is Pope and he will do as he pleases with or without their 2/3's majority.

Personally, M.J. thinks Our Pope and Our Cross is proceeding rapidly to his death for Divine Providence will surely be withdrawn from him before Jesus will permit him to destroy His Church.

Reread Vatican 1. It is an Infallible Truth that the See of Peter will ALWAYS keep the Faith.

M.J wished the Pope would retire and throw-in with the heretical schismatics of the east; that is where he belongs doctrinally and spiritually but, he would't be accepted by them owing to his outrageous Indifferentism.

Hurricane Francis continues to pit mercy and or love against law; that is, he is sermonising against Jesus who taught that if we loved Him we would keep His commandments.

And all of his talk about mercy this and love that is belied by his palpable hatred of traditionalists and his rebarbative praxis against the Franciscans and others.

He is a rank hypocrite.

Son of Ya'Kov said...

Um Kasper himself in his own words likened his proposals to developments in doctrine & cited such instances as "Error has no right but erroneous people" in regards to past Church teaching on religious freedom.

Also I quoted Fr. Barron & others pointed out he didn't say Newman can be used to defend Kasper.

He said both sides should read Newman and just Kasper's proposals by then.

Dr. B you yourself said there where problems with Newman.

So what gives?

Ralph Roister-Doister said...


Francis was the archbishop of a third world country. Some may argue that Argentina cannot be considered third world in the same sense as Somalia or Bangladesh. Perhaps not. Maybe Argentina has graduated, in some sense, to second world status: I don't much care. The point is that Argentina is not England or the United States.

When Francis acceded to the throne, he did so rattling on not about the the innate dignity of anal sex practitioners, but about The Poor The Poor The Poor. Second-Third world countries are not generally thought to be appreciative of practitioners of deviant sexuality, and it is reasonable to guess that Francis's outlook did not differ appreciably. But these countries are quite vocal on the subjects of poverty, economic equity, and the like. After all, in such countries the poor are not those who cannot afford a flat screen TV: they are those who literally cannot feed their families, oftentimes relying on local dumps to provide them food. No one there is likely to have much concern with the sensitivities of sodomites.

But then Francis began to runneth over with admiration for what sodomites and adulterers can teach the rest of us. What this indicates to me is that the world's progressives, as reflected in the Church's collection of cardinals, bishops and archbishops, have bonded into an alliance that Francis, and the leader of the first world progressivists -- who has turned out to be Kasper -- is attempting to use to transform the Catholic Church into something other than itself.

What a golden opportunity! No opposition worth mentioning! We have third world issues of liturgical reform and economic equity bonding with first world issues of liturgical reform and tolerance of rainbow sexuality, all acting as grist for the mill of present synods and synods to come. They're all in, baby!! Six continents worth!! The Africans want "African theology" and liturgical dancing, the Asians want "Asian theology" and less guidance from Rome. The Europeans and Americans want no theology whatsoever (hell, they’re moronic enough to accept Scott Hahn’s family as a suitable model for the Trinity) but plenty of sex, sex and more sex! The orthodox minority can be dealt with, right Francis? Send 'em all to Malta! Or THREATEN to send them -- in most cases that will be enough for those gutless wonders.

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Pastoral activity is no art of compromise and concession but the art of saving souls through the truth is the 1970s description of our continuing crisis as described by Cardinal Siri.

It was he, in the 1970s, who referenced a dictatorship of opinion and it was he who recognized the resurrection of gnosis within the Church and it was he who noted that where once the crisis was from without - outer persecution - now the crisis is from within – doctrinal perversion – and he also cited the modern tendency of the Church to adopt the ideas of the world and, thus one speaks of liberals and conservatives – relative terms – rather than truth and error; thus virtually everything is reduced to relativism and the Chruch becomes mute regarding truth and error.

Thus we have the absolutely absurd Synod with modernist Prelates bathetically opining about how we ought accommodate the Divorced and Remarried and they babble on about the putative positive qualities of sodomites.

It's all B.S. and Fr Barron is wilidly wrong in defending it.

Son of Ya'Kov said...

Now this is interesting.


Do not confuse sacramental discipline and Catholic doctrine.
By Dr. Jeff Mirus

http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/the-city-gates.cfm?id=908

Quote", the Kasper Proposal was not intrinsically unorthodox. Proponents of that proposal are not (for that reason) heretics, and could have positive reasons for examining the issue. If Pope Francis wanted the proposal seriously considered, this does not call his personal orthodoxy into question."END QUOTE

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Pope Felix III Not to oppose error is to approve it, and not to defend truth is to suppress it, and indeed to neglect to confound evil men when we can do it, is no less a sin than to encourage them.

The Synod was rehashing long-settled Doctrine in an attempt to satisfy the agenda of Our Pope and Our Cross and which agenda is aught but a mimicking of the schismatic heretics of the east who approve of divorce and remarriage and whose putative Sdynodalism is supposed to be a model for the Church. (Yeah, that what he desires. He wants the Church to be more like the false religion of the east)

The Bishop of Rome hand-picked Cardinal Baldiserri to manipulate the process towards the intended result and this is a very old modernist machination that M.J lived through during the Renew Process with the Call to Action creeps headed-up by Bishop Gerety.

Such a process is supposed to give the illusion of free debate and intellectual inquiry blah blah blah but it is a rigged system that prevents the very things it boasts are intrinsic to the process; and of course that is precisely what we saw with this execrable synod.

Meet the new Synod same as the old Renew Scam of the neo-arians.

One thing that was admittedly a delight to read was the Cardinal's speech to a Swiss delegation (as M.J recalls) in which he cited Pope Blessed Paul Vi and his instituting the Synod in 1965 while admitting that Synod form has grown moribund and needed the renewall brought to it by the Bishop of Rome.

Yes. exactly., The new ways of the shadow church do not even last for forty years before they descend into incompetence and incomprehensibility.

It was a most welcome confession of the continued failure of that modernism which advances towards perdition in the felt vestments of the new theology.

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

http://eponymousflower.blogspot.com/2014/11/bishop-schneider-attacks-pharisaical.html#more

This Pope's radical naturalistic agenda is DEAD.

He has two choices; resign or publicly pretend he believes what the Church has always taught.

JFM said...

MIrus is right. But what he fails to point out is that the Pope's silence and ambiguity does call into question his prudence, governing instincts, and intentions. As for his orthodoxy, it is assumed. Just as is a spouses faithfulness, against all evidence to the contrary, unless there is overt proof. Which does not make many marriages any less strife-ridden.