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| Vatican City |
As a Maine Catholic I had to comment, because what the MSM means by “more moderate” is a pope who won’t call abortion “murdering babies.” A “more moderate” pope would play down the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered” and would lift Pope Benedict’s ban on homosexuals being admitted to seminaries. A “more moderate” won’t believe as Pope Benedict does that the Church’s nightmare scandal in America and Europe was a homosexual priest scandal and not a pedophile priest scandal.
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| Benedict XVI |
A “more moderate” pope would be “worth a bucket of warm spit,” as Vice President John Nance Garner said about the vice presidency. Revelation 3:16 says “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." A moderate pope is what the Catholic Church absolutely does not need, especially at this critical juncture. So-called “moderate” Catholics are people like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, to name just a few and there is no shortage of their counterparts in the Vatican.
I’m fine with a young pope, as long as he is on fire in his faith. He’ll need energy to cope with the “moderates” from Europe and the United States because he’ll have a tough time with them. My advice to those who want the Catholic Church to moderate itself? Leave. Join the Episcopalians or the Unitarians.
That there’s a homosexual cabal in the Vatican wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That Benedict was shocked to discover it just last December I don’t believe for a minute. As Philip Lawler points out at Catholicculture.org:
Pope Benedict, who has lived in Rome and worked with the Roman Curia for more than 30 years, has surely heard the reports and the rumors. He cannot possibly have been shocked by the news that some Vatican officials are homosexual. ‘He is probably the last person who would be surprised by such a so-called revelation,’ remarked Jean-Marie Guenois, another veteran Vatican journalist and editor of Le Figaro.
That fits with my view. As former editor of The Pilot, America’s oldest Catholic newspaper and official media outlet of the Archdiocese of Boston, Lawler is quite familiar with the workings of powerful homosexuals in the Catholic Church.
He wrote about them in a brilliant but depressing book entitled “The Faithful Departed.” Do you want to understand why Boston Cardinal Bernard Law resigned? Want to understand why New Hampshire’s Republican house majority leader called [then NH] Bishop John McCormack a “pedophile pimp who should have been led away from the State House in handcuffs with a raincoat over his head”? Read Lawler’s book. Lawler ran The Pilot from 1992 to 2005 during the thick of the homosexual priest scandal and knew both men very well.You won’t see Phil Lawler on the “Today Show” or in any other MSM outlet. He knows what was really caused the scandal and so does Michael Rose, who in his book “Good-bye Good Men” claimed that upwards of 40% of American priests who went to seminary between the seventies and the nineties were actively homosexual. You won’t see Rose on “The Today Show” either. Their analyses don’t fit the MSM spin on the sex scandal set in motion by “The Boston Globe” in 2002.
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| John Paul II. No moderate he. |
The Catholic Church in Europe and America has suffered severe decline under the leadership of “moderate” priests, bishops and cardinals. God save us from a moderate pope.
10 comments:
Wow! Right on. You obviously are not going to be tickling ears with this piece Tom.
Keep speaking the truth.
And God save us from the likes of you and your ilk.
Excellent and timely article. Just finished reading With The Pope Against The Homoheresy by Fr.Dariusz Oko, Ph.D. found @The Vortex site. Your article fits in perfectly. We have been lead away from biblical truths by design. The Marxist infiltration of Christianity defeats the basic principles of our country and paves the way for a secular new world order. Enter China.
But your Christian God of course had nothing to do with these people being homosexual although He is given credit for being our Creator. This does puzzle me.
The Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are sinful. Many high officials in the church commit those sins regularly and cover for each other.
Homosexual activists and the MSM trumpet the fiction that homosexuality is innate. I don't believe it. Evidence to support it ranges from non-existent to thin.
You can believe it if you want. I don't intend to debate the question in this forum.
Mr M - astute article about the RC situation! U r right on. Raised as an Eastern Rite Catholic, and with a slightly more comprehensive view of Catholicism, I have been interested in what is happening in Rome. Kudos to Pope Benedict. He knows his time is limited And he is leaving while he can exert influence on the choosing of the next Pope. He is turning away from his life's mission for the greater good of the church. Tk u for elucidating so succinctly the RC situation.
Ur recent 'homely' articles have been a balm to our souls in these dys of divisive politics.
Alexandra Cook, South Tamworth
Amen and amen, Tom.
A couple of observations:
In spite of all the spin that some play when it comes to being 'moderate' aka 'sensitive', 'tolerant', 'open-minded', blah, blah, blah, it's all rubbish.
There can be no such thing as a 'moderate Catholic Christian'. It's akin to one saying that your daughter might be 'moderately' pregnant with twins!
Those public officials you name may be baptised Catholics but their public hostility to the Church and its teaching, especially that of killing the unborn, reveals the deeper truth of their standing within the mystical body of Christ.
Being a Catholic requires the embrace of the Catholic faith; including the doctrine and authority of the Church. To be Catholic is by nature to be 'orthodox' and orthodoxy is neither conservative nor liberal for its source is divine. Of course one might choose to embrace a more conservative or a more liberal style within the Church but that matters little really. Blessed John Paul II, the Great, had style in spades. A trained athlete and actor, he brought some gifts to his ministry that had broad appeal even well beyond the Church. Still, there is absolutely no difference between JP II and the shy and professorial academic Benedict XVI in terms of 'being Catholic'. If one or the other were not orthodox or somehow betrayed the faith of the Church it would have been an enormous scandal and the candlesticks would have been overturned.
The thing is, of course, that whomever holds the Petrine office, whether a scandalous sinner as some have been or a charismatic and godly saint, is and always has been one who is orthodox.
You mention the Episcopalians/Anglicans. For the past few decades they chose to go down the road against most of the Catholic orthodoxy that they once defended and how has that worked out for them? In a blatant effort to appeal to the popular culture, they became what the world wanted of them with respect to the doctrine of faith and morals. With some of their bishops actually denying Christ's divinity to endorsing abortion, homosexuality, same-sex unions et al, and in some cases making their Church unrecognisable to hundreds of thousands of their laypeople, the result has been a disaster and the Church become moribund. Their sheep have been scattered and fallen away.
What most people don't know is that the homosexual sub-culture has been a part of Anglican/Episcopal life as much as it is within the Roman Church but because it does not have the profile of the Catholic Church is largely ignored by the media. Besides, what was once hidden is now celebrated in that denomination.
Continued (sorry for the length!)
Sadly, the enormous sexual scandals of paedophilia (of pre-pubescent children) and more commonly ephebophilia (of adolescents) within the Catholic Church has also scattered many from the fold. I have read each of Lawlor's and Rose's books and from my own experience within both the Anglican and Catholic Churches, in monastery and seminary and beyond, over 40 years, what they say is bang on.
It is a great shame and grossly unfair that the media in these recent weeks have put the blame for decades-old abuse and the growth of the sub-culture on the shoulders of Benedict XVI. As both Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope, it was he who in the past twenty years, did the difficult job of gradually 'cleaning house', i.e., closing seminaries, firing rectors, professors and bishops and generating/establishing renewed structures in the acceptance of candidates for the priesthood. So, he didn't finish the job. Is it any wonder? The sub-culture that has been so deeply embedded in the European and North American Church (note: not the African Church, eh?) is going to require even more surgery. My guess is that, as I think you are suggesting, the new Pope will clean house at the Vatican and abroad.
It is perhaps a little ironic that the media/pop gurus who find it so easy to judge and dismiss the Catholic Church for its scandals is the same gang that breeds and nurtures that culture in magazines, videos, music and film.
To be enjoy a 'moderate' temperament is without doubt a good thing. After all, is it not true that moderation in our varied appetites, from single malt whisky to Dunkin' Donuts is a healthy principle. To be considered a 'moderate' Catholic, however, means to be an 'unfaithful' Catholic and while Catholic laypeople, seens and unseen, can live that way with apparent impunity (they think) it cannot be for one who is to be a Shepherd in Christ's flock. Because far too many have abandoned their sheep as well as their own conviction, thousands have been either deliberately or inadvertently devoured by the wolves.
With you, I pray that God, the Holy Spirit, will inspire the election of a man on fire who can both strengthen as well as purge the household of faith.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility
Isn't the Pope the voice of God on earth? How can he be moderate? If he says something "moderate," it's you who are too conservative in the eyes of your God.
Just like your Lord, Jesus Christ, asked you to help the poor, and to not commit murder, and to not judge others, and to love your neighbors. But I, too, like to bend my Almighty Superior's words to fit my own worldview.
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