Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Robert Royal: "So now we know"

Robert Royal,"A Bizarre Papal Move" (The Catholic Thing, September 14, 2016):
So now we know. We knew before, really, but didn’t have explicit confirmation. The long, agonizing slog, however, is finally over: from Pope Francis’ invitation to Cardinal Kasper to address the bishops in Rome in February of 2014 to the pope’s letter last week to some Argentinean bishops affirming guidelines they had developed in a joint document that, in “exceptional cases,” people divorced and remarried (living in an “adulterous” relationship as we believed for 2000 years in Western Christianity), may receive Holy Communion. This whole affair is bizarre. No other word will do....

....Indeed, Catholics have a new teaching now, not only on divorce and remarriage. We have a new vision of the Eucharist. It’s worth recalling that in January the pope, coyly, not ruling it out, suggested to a group of Lutherans in Rome that they, too, should “talk with the Lord” and “go forward.” Indeed, they later took Communion at Mass in the Vatican. In a way, that was even more significant. A Catholic couple, divorced and remarried, are sinners, but – at least in principle – still Catholic. Has intercommunion with non-Catholic Christians also been decided now without any consultation – almost as if such a momentous step in understanding the Sacrament of Unity hardly matters?

I say this in sorrow, but I’m afraid that the rest of this papacy is now going to be rent by bands of dissenters, charges of papal heresy, threats of – and perhaps outright –schism. Lord, have mercy.

6 comments:

bill bannon said...

But more than writing is needed. We need a Bishops' statement of conscientious objection and sincere non compliance. Without that, the Church limps diminished going forward. This is now Church as flickering light.

Anonymous said...

OH NO.

le bourgeouis gentilhomme said...

I wrote on this blog a few years ago that if this pope, representing third world radicals, was able to overlook cultural sensitivities and unite with first world radical progressives such as Kasper, the last impediment to organism-wide metastasis of the V2 cancer would be dissolved. Didn't take long, did it?

Hooray, I was right! I'm a prophet! Ain't I great!

I am telling you all now that we are living in a post-Catholic era. The Roman Catholic Church of the ages is dying. Its guts have already been hollowed out. The V2 cancer will eventually consume it. The process is proceeding faster than any of us know, with whole portions of the Church already putrescent. From its dying breath something true will issue, only God knows what. But everything that the Church has been for the past two millennia is fading to nothingness before our eyes. This pope is killing it, but it is important to realize that there is nothing unique about him: he is only the crest of a wave that has been building for a century or more. There is a moment coming, not too far ahead of us, when traditionalists will realize that one cannot be a Catholic if he is not also a sedevacantist.

Pertinacious Papist said...

le bourgeouise gentildoisterhomme,

It's always good hearing from you. Even when it's bad hearing from you. The evangelicals published a version of the Gospel called "Good News for Modern Man." Your version could be "Bad News for Postmodern Man." Still, who wouldn't rather have a bucket of cold-iced reality than a hot tub religion of over-heated fantasy?

My hope is in the "something true" that will eventually issue from these death throes.

Pertinaciously, PB

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

LBG (Sort of an unfortunate acronym) Your performance was great but you faltered and stumbled on your dismount :)

The sine qua non of Catholicism is unity with local Bishop and Pope and Franciscus is Pope.

Franciscus can't change doctrine and a pastoral change is not a doctrinal change

le bourgeois gentilhomme said...

A fine one you are to talk about unfortunate blog names!

"Change" is such an inadequate word. If the local bishop throws your mother down a well and pours cement after her, is she "changed"? Does your touching faith that the great lady is still down there underneath all that bondage, inviolate and indomitable for all that, comfort you, while you are celebrating your unity with the latest smegmatic rapscallion who put her there?