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Title: Conservative Roman Catholic theologians accuse pope of spreading heresy
Source:
Crux Catholic Media
URL Source: https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2 ... -accuse-pope-spreading-heresy/
Published: Sep 24, 2017
Author: Associated Press
Post Date: 2017-09-24 20:35:02 by Hondo68
Keywords: None
Views: 4772
Comments: 34
VATICAN CITY — Several dozen tradition-minded Roman Catholic theologians, priests and academics have formally accused Pope Francis of spreading heresy with his 2016 opening to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. In a 25-page letter delivered to Francis last month and provided Saturday to The Associated Press, the 62 signatories issued a “filial correction” to the pope — a measure they said hadn’t been employed since the 14th century. The letter accused Francis of propagating seven heretical positions concerning marriage, moral life and the sacraments with his 2016 document “The Joy of Love” and subsequent “acts, words and omissions.” The initiative follows another formal act by four tradition-minded cardinals who wrote Francis last year asking him to clarify a series of questions, or “dubbia,” they had about his 2016 text. Francis hasn’t responded to either initiative. The Vatican spokesman didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment late Saturday. None of the signatories of the new letter is a cardinal, and the highest-ranking churchman listed is actually someone whose organization has no legal standing in the Catholic Church: Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior of the breakaway Society of St. Pius X. Several other signatories are well-known admirers of the old Latin Mass which Fellay’s followers celebrate. Also among the signatories are a handful of well-known Catholic figures from around the world, including Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a former president of the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called “Vatican bank,” and Italian Monsignor Antonio Livi, former dean of the philosophy faculty at Rome’s Pontifical Lateran University. Organizers said the initiative was nevertheless significant and a sign of the concern among a certain contingent of academics and pastors over Francis’s positions, which they said posed a danger to the faithful. “There is a role for theologians and philosophers to explain to people the church’s teaching, to correct misunderstandings,” said Joseph Shaw, a spokesman for the initiative, signatory of the correction and senior research fellow in moral philosophy at Oxford University. When it was released in April 2016, “The Joy of Love” immediately sparked controversy because it opened the door to letting civilly remarried Catholics receive Communion. Church teaching holds that unless these Catholics obtain an annulment — a church decree that their first marriage was invalid — they cannot receive the sacraments, since they are seen as committing adultery. Francis didn’t create a church-wide pass for these Catholics, but suggested — in vague terms and strategically placed footnotes — that bishops and priests could do so on a case-by-case basis after accompanying them on a spiritual journey of discernment. Subsequent comments and writings have made clear he intended such wiggle room, part of his belief that God’s mercy extends in particular to sinners and that the Eucharist isn’t a prize for the perfect but nourishment for the weak. Shaw said none of the four cardinals involved in the initial “dubbia” letter, nor any other cardinal, was involved in the “filial correction.” Organizers said the last time such a correction was issued was to Pope John XXII in 1333 for errors which he later recanted. The letter and accompanying materials may be found here. Crux Staff also contributed to this report. Pope Francis talks to an infant during his visit to the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome, Friday, Sept. 22, 2017. (Credit: L'Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP.) Poster Comment: Looks like someone at the Vatican doesn't like heretics, and gave Francis a black eye. Maybe Benny 16, the shadow Pope?
Pope Francis waves as he arrives in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican for his weekly general audience on Sept. 20, 2017. A total of 62 clergy, theologians and other academics, though no cardinals and only one bishop from a break-away traditionalist society, have signed a letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy for his document 'Amoris Laetitia' and its cautious opening to Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, with organizers saying the last time such a "correction" happened was in 1333 under Pope John XXII.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 29.
#3. To: hondo68 (#0)
I almost posted on this story, given how many eyebrows are raised by it within Catholic circles. But the story I was going to post was much much longer and I thought no one here at LF would read it or comment. I did happen to mention/link that story just a bit ago on another unrelated LF thread so I thought I'd post the link here for anyone that really wants all the gritty details. I think we all know that LifeSite will take a very strong pro-life view and it is very traditionally Catholic. Perhaps more Catholic than the pope, or at least more Catholic than Pope Frank is. And that is the gist of this controversy, it seems. LifeSiteNews: 62 scholars correct Pope Francis for ‘propagating heresies’
What Protestants!
a new protestant reformation, last time this happened there was blood in the streets
The first and still the most popular Evangelical Protestant was Muhammad. Virtually every time President Trump tweets or appears on Fox News, thousands convert to the protestant denomination of Islam. Evangelical Wahhabi Don is winnnnning!
Wow how can you defend such a position. You can't and I don't expect you to.
This was the defining moment when Muhammad became an evangelical protestant .
Muhammad was a pagan before his satanic visions. How you get "evangelical" from that is quite puzzling.
You don't get the large number of converts that Mo made during his lifetime, by sitting on the Catholic couch with Newt and Nancy. Muhammad was very active in evangelical preaching up of his new protestant cult. Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. It vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was_not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing. It differed from most (not from all) heresies in this, that it did not arise within the bounds of the Christian Church. The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world_on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel_which inspired his convictions. He came of, and mixed with, the degraded idolaters of the Arabian wilderness, the conquest of which had never seemed worth the Romans' while. He took over very few of those old pagan ideas which might have been native to him from his descent. On the contrary, he preached and insisted upon a whole group of ideas which were peculiar to the Catholic Church and distinguished it from the paganism which it had conquered in the Greek and Roman civilization. Thus the very foundation of his teaching was that prime Catholic doctrine, the unity and omnipotence of God. The attributes of God he also took over in the main from Catholic doctrine: the personal nature, the all-goodness, the timelessness, the providence of God, His creative power as the origin of all things, and His sustenance of all things by His power alone. The world of good spirits and angels and of evil spirits in rebellion against God was a part of the teaching, with a chief evil spirit, such as Christendom had recognized. Mohammed preached with insistence that prime Catholic doctrine, on the human side_the immortality of the soul and its responsibility for actions in this life, coupled with the consequent doctrine of punishment and reward after death. If anyone sets down those points that orthodox Catholicism has in common with Mohammedanism, and those points only, one might imagine if one went no further that there should have been no cause of quarrel. Mohammed would almost seem in this aspect to be a sort of missionary, preaching and spreading by the energy of his character the chief and fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Church among those who had hitherto been degraded pagans of the Desert. He gave to Our Lord the highest reverence, and to Our Lady also, for that matter. On the day of judgment (another Catholic idea which he taught) it was Our Lord, according to Mohammed, who would be the judge of mankind, not he, Mohammed. The Mother of Christ, Our Lady, "the Lady Miriam" was ever for him the first of womankind. His followers even got from the early fathers some vague hint of her Immaculate Conception.[1] But the central point where this new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full denial of the Incarnation. Mohammed did not merely take the first steps toward that denial, as the Arians and their followers had done; he advanced a clear affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether. With that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure. He refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with its Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of the Mass, and therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification. Catholic doctrine was true (he seemed to say), but it had become encumbered with false accretions; it had become complicated by needless man-made additions, including the idea that its founder was Divine, and the growth of a parasitical caste of priests who battened on a late, imagined, system of Sacraments which they alone could administer. All those corrupt accretions must be swept away. There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same. As we all know, the new teaching relaxed the marriage laws_but in practice this did not affect the mass of his followers who still remained monogamous. It made divorce as easy as possible, for the sacramental idea of marriage disappeared. It insisted upon the equality of men, and it necessarily had that further factor in which it resembled Calvinism_the sense of predestination, the sense of fate; of what the followers of John Knox were always calling "the immutable decrees of God." Mohammed's teaching never developed among the mass of his followers, or in his own mind, a detailed theology. He was content to accept all that appealed to him in the Catholic scheme and to reject all that seemed to him, and to so many others of his time, too complicated or mysterious to be true. Simplicity was the note of the whole affair; and since all heresies draw their strength from some true doctrine, Mohammedanism drew its strength from the true Catholic doctrines which it retained: the equality of all men before God_"All true believers are brothers." It zealously preached and throve on the paramount claims of justice, social and economic. Now, why did this new, simple, energetic heresy have its sudden overwhelming success? One answer is that it won battles. It won them at once, as we shall see when we come to the history of the thing. But winning battles could not have made Islam permanent or even strong had there not been a state of affairs awaiting some such message and ready to accept it. Both in the world of Hither Asia and in the Graeco-Roman world of the Mediterranean, but especially in the latter, society had fallen, much as our society has today, into a tangle wherein the bulk of men were disappointed and angry and seeking for a solution to the whole group of social strains. There was indebtedness everywhere; the power of money and consequent usury. There was slavery everywhere. Society reposed upon it, as ours reposes upon wage slavery today. There was weariness and discontent with theological debate, which, for all its intensity, had grown out of touch with the masses. There lay upon the freemen, already tortured with debt, a heavy burden of imperial taxation; and there was the irritant of existing central government interfering with men's lives; there was the tyranny of the lawyers and their charges. To all this Islam came as a vast relief and a solution of strain. The slave who admitted that Mohammed was the prophet of God and that the new teaching had, therefore, divine authority, ceased to be a slave. The slave who adopted Islam was henceforward free. The debtor who "accepted" was rid of his debts. Usury was forbidden. The small farmer was relieved not only of his debts but of his crushing taxation. Above all, justice could be had without buying it from lawyers. . . . All this in theory. The practice was not nearly so complete. Many a convert remained a debtor, many were still slaves. But wherever Islam conquered there was a new spirit of freedom and relaxation. It was the combination of all these things, the attractive simplicity of the doctrine, the sweeping away of clerical and imperial discipline, the huge immediate practical advantage of freedom for the slave and riddance of anxiety for the debtor, the crowning advantage of free justice under few and simple new laws easily understood_that formed the driving force behind the astonishing Mohammedan social victory. The courts were everywhere accessible to all without payment and giving verdicts which all could understand. The Mohammedan movement was essentially a "Reformation," and we can discover numerous affinities between Islam and the Protestant Reformers_on Images, on the Mass, on Celibacy, etc.
Considering Muhammad was instructed by Catholic clergy prior to his conquests, I guess that makes him the second Protestants after the Orthodox church. However, now that I know what you were beating around the bush about...you don't condemn modern day Evangelicals but the 1st Century Evangelicals. The NT church did not sit around waiting for people to darken a church door. They went out and preached the Gospel and some lost their lives doing so.
#31. To: redleghunter (#29)
Interesting post about mohommanpd and catholics.
Muhammad was 5th century, and the first protestant denomination that has withstood the test of time. No doubt there were other heritics that are virtually unknown. If Mo were operating today, he'd probably have a mega church in Houston like Joel Osteen. ;)
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#12. To: Tooconservative (#3)
The 62 clergy and lay scholars explain that, as believing and practicing Catholics, they have the right and duty to issue such a correction to the Pope “by natural law, by the law of Christ, and by the law of the Church” and that the correction in no way undermines Catholic teaching on papal infallibility.
#14. To: redleghunter (#12)
#19. To: paraclete, evangelical prot muhammad (#14)
a new protestant reformation, last time this happened there was blood in the streets
#24. To: hondo68 (#19)
The first and still the most popular Evangelical Protestant was Muhammad.
#25. To: redleghunter, turned from Jerusalem, protestant (#24)
According to the traditional account, on 11 February 624, while praying in the Masjid al-Qiblatayn in Medina, Muhammad received revelations from God that he should be facing Mecca rather than Jerusalem during prayer. Muhammad adjusted to the new direction, and his companions praying with him followed his lead, beginning the tradition of facing Mecca during prayer.
#26. To: hondo68 (#25)
This was the defining moment when Muhammad became an evangelical protestant .
#27. To: redleghunter, reformation (#26)
How you get "evangelical" from that is quite puzzling.
The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed
#29. To: hondo68 (#27)
Replies to Comment # 29.
#32. To: redleghunter, 5th century infamous evangelical protestant (#29)
the 1st Century Evangelicals
End Trace Mode for Comment # 29.
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