By “We” I will assume you mean the Church, fine, but at what cost? The Church as it was 2000 years ago tortured so-called non-believers, killed those accused of witchcraft and is responsible, in some fashion for war after war, meanwhile Pius XII stood pat, nary uttering a word during the holocaust itself. These changes in understanding are nothing more than the Church realizing it will fail to thrive unless it changes -just enough- to meet prevailing thought. Dragged kicking and screaming into the 17th century in middle of 1940.
Regarding as it was mentioned previously the forgiveness of previous transgressions. That is all well and good, and may be a core principle of Catholic thought, but moving pederasts and pedophiles from parish to parish all the while creating new victims and never addressing the true problem in a meaningful way until they were forced to is a perfect example of this “change in understanding” you mention. Tell me, what "understanding"must be changed for someone to realize that having relations with a child is the wrong thing to do and that just “forgiving” someone for their transgressions does not remove your societal obligation to the rule of law?
The funny thing about modernism is that it exists hand in hand with evolution. To follow the 10 commandments is a time honored and proven Good Thing. To stone your wife to death or keep slaves is also time honored and proven, but is a BAD thing. The Church, it seems has a hard time telling the two apart, yet they remain.
It may seem like an attack or pitting, but is it really an attack when you’re beaten by your own club?
Except that I’m not discussing facts, I’m discussing public perception. If the Pope does something that offends a lot of Jews, he should be aware that he’s doing so, and he should either take steps to reduce that offense or be ready to be viewed as anti-Jewish. And that’s true EVEN if what he’s doing is for precise and clearly drawn reasons which have nothing to do with Judaism whatsoever.
It’s like if there were a public art museum in Austria which had written into its bylaws “any exhibition of art from a native-born Austrian painter which has at least 20 works and is supported by 2000 signatures shall be shown for no less than two weeks” or something, and a bunch of neo-nazis get 2000 signatures to put on an exhibition of Hitler’s art, and the museum realizes that there is no clause in its bylaws to allow rejection of the exhibition. If they go ahead and follow their own precise rules and host an exhibition of Hitler’s paintings are they being anti-semitic? No. But they will certainly be PERCEIVED as anti-semitic, so (assuming they care) they can go out of their way to add disclaimers aplenty. Because when people read “austrian museum to hold show of Hitler’s paintings” they’re going to quite reasonably get upset and not necessarily read the bit about the bylaws and the signatures.
No, but he should be aware of it. In the wake of The Da Vinci Code, there are probably millions of people who have the wrong impression of Opus Dei. Should the pope refuse to send members of Opus Dei out to do things because ignorant people are afraid they’re crazy fanatics? No. But he should certainly be aware that that incorrect impression exists, and take it into consideration when making decisions.
I guess the reason I slightly bristle at the (I have no doubt fundamentally factually accurate) point you’re making here is that it ignores the political reality that the decision to “officially” excommunicate someone is made by people - people who aren’t necessarily motivated purely by total spiritual pureness. You make it sound as if it’s always clear whether any individual has done things which “in themselves separate him from the communion of the faithful”, and all that the pope is doing is initialing at the bottom of the page to make official what everyone already knows. And I’m sure there are clear cut cases of precisely that. But I’m way too cynical not to think that (particularly in the past) it was used by fallible humans as a bargaining chip, a way to bully, etc. In which case, it’s hard not to interpret the current actions in that light.
If you really believe that then you have taken a very short course in history.
mswas you do seem to express the POV of the current Pope’s rule. A belief that the problems that the Church has today, “becoming stagnant, … no passion in it and people … leaving the fold”, is that it has strayed too far into modernity and has “abandoned fundamentals” and that the solution is to be truer to a more unapologetic Catholicism. It isn’t just us outsiders who see this as a victory for those of the Church who rejected Vatican 2, including its call for religious tolerance, the current leader of the movement sees it that way too.
I’d like to highlight some of that linked Newsweek article to you.
DSeid It’s possible that the Vatican is heading towards a schism. Maybe Malachi is right and this is the final pope.
Full disclosure, I am not Catholic. However, I do recognize that religious institutions that compromise core values cannot sustain themselves, so I don’t hold it against them when they want to maintain a certain doctrinal purity.
How many divisions does the Pope have?
The reality is he can’t maintain state relgious coercion, he just doesn’t have the power to do it. Being opposed to religious freedom is one thing, but that doesn’t mean he can accomplish a rollback on modernity. It’s not like strict Jews are all that open to other people’s religions either. They just aren’t proselytizing so it’s ok for the stupid goyim to be wrong, God chose them, and that’s that.
The whole notion of religious tolerance is a bit put on. No one is actually tolerant of other religions. Even the secularists with their banner of religious tolerance tolerate religions only insofar as they abandon their core doctrine and resemble some sort of watered down flavor of Unitarianism. Religious tolerance is a thin veneer all around. But religions can have relationships with one another that can be amicable to a point. As long as they can look past their mutual intolerance.
There’s not much to be had if the price of Catholic-Jewish relations is Catholics completely abandoning the catechism.
Commenting that Bishop Williamson is the “most notorious” and “undoubtedly…the most cretinous in this (current-day) lot of (right-wing) sectarians”, he notes that Williamson “not only (denies) the Holocaust and defend(s) the authenticity of the czarist forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. He has also advocated (that): Women should not attend universities and must never wear pantsuits.”
Well, one* out of four ain’t bad. :dubious:
Also from Father Oakes: "Bishop Tissier de Mallerais (one of the other ex-excommunicated followers of Lefebvre) once said “The church for its part has at all times forbidden and condemned the killing of Jews, even when their grave defects rendered them odious to the nations among which they were established…All this makes us think that the Jews are the most active artisans for the coming of Antichrist.'”
That’ll have to wait until after the Superbowl.
Oakes writes that there’s still a huge p.r. problem for the Pope, whose solution will depend in part on whether the Lefebvrists “discipline the anti-Semites in their midst (or purge them if they prove obstreperous)”.
One useful move the Pope could make - donate some meaningful bucks to restoration and maintenance of Auschwitz, which is starting to fall into decay.
*Visions of Hillary Clinton in pantsuits come unwillingly to mind.
I’m not sure what you intended to say, but I would see this statement as seriously flawed.
Attempts to convert Jews are deeply offensive, given the long history of forced conversions and expulsions of Jews who chose to express their own beliefs. On the other hand, while the church might view a failure to accept the divinity of Jesus to be an unfortunate, (or even tragic), situation, it is hardly “offensive” by any reasonable standard.
Regardless whether the current expression of the church is a “new teaching” or a “new understanding” of ancient teachings, there is clearly no offense expressed by the church that Jews do not accept the divinity of Jesus. As noted in paragraphs 839 and 840 of today’s Catechism, the current attitude of the church toward Judaism is hardly one indicating that the church takes offense or insult.
Benny is an asshole, no doubt about it. Benny and the Devil both wear Prada. But not with regard to the “reconciliation” with the formerly four “excommunicated”. They were not excommunicated for their despicable Holocaust denial, but rather for attempting schism. That’s probably the very worst thing they can do in the eyes of the RCC, and it was a knife aimed at the Vatican’s heart. They recanted and repented and church doctrine is that excommunication is only handed out to encourage such repentance. Holocaust denial is the worst thing one can say around Jewish people. Unfortunately that isn’t the case with spouting off around non-Jews. The Church has no punishment for people who have hateful fantasy versions of history not involving the Church.
I would hope that The Pope in the future would condemn Holocaust denial for the hateful bigotry it is, and he actually might. But let’s keep in mind that the Pope and the RCC as a whole have condemned Islam as evil and do the equivalent of excommunication to all Protestants. Denying Communion to any Christian is theologically worse than killing them.
The Pope didn’t quite condemn Islam as evil. That’s the very most simplistic reading of the Regensburg speech one can take. What he actually said is that Islam is not consonant with Reason because it is not Covenantal and that Allah by Muslim theology can change any of the rules of reality at any given moment unlike the Christian God who made a promise not to do that.
The root word of Protestant is PROTEST. You do realize that what’s being protested is the Catholic church right? To a Protestant Communion is irrelevant because you do not recognize the authority of the Pope or the Church. So no, it’s not theologically worse than killing them. Again the Protestant example illustrates Sarahfeena’s point perfectly. The church didn’t abandon them, they abandoned the church, in a very public and violent way I might add.
And the Pope has condemned holocaust denial, and anti-semitism is verboten by official policy.
If you’re going to call the Pope a bigot merely for being Catholic, then you should at least do the bare minimum of research into the topic.
tomndebb On further thought actually the whole line about ‘perfidious’ Jews comes from the fact that the church found it deeply offensive that the Jews would deny the messiah who came specifically to them. Yes, historically the Catholic church has moved past that, but it’s unreasonable, and intolerant of the Catholic faith to expect them not to want to bring Jews into the ‘one true faith’.
That’s one of the interesting things about religious tolerance debates. They are at the root completely comical, because everyone wants tolerance for their own religion without having to be tolerant of the other religion. It’s ok to bash Catholics. The irony in this thread as elucidated clearly in Second Stone’s post is talking about Catholic intolerance toward Muslims when in general there is more tolerance by Christians of Muslims in the Modern world than there is the reverse. Basically the expectation of tolerance goes one way, Christians should be tolerant, but other religions have no obligation to be tolerant of Christians. I agree Christians SHOULD be tolerant, but the idea that the moral obligation only cuts one direction is absurd.
DSeid, I’m not an expert by any means, but what the quote from this link is saying is that the reason for the excommunication still stands…this Pope did not lift the excommunication because he disagreed with the original reason for it. mswas’s point is that if he DID disagree with it, he would allow these men to act as bishops and the community would not be in a state of schism with the Church. I’m guessing what is going on here is that he’s allowing them to have a chance to come back and make right with the Church.
Tom, just to be clear, you are not speaking RCC doctrine here, as much of what follows Sections 848 et seq. makes clear that mission and apostolic duties are meant to apply to all peoples, with no particularistic carve-outs.
This is verging on a debate that we had I think years ago on supercessionism and “no salvation outside the Church.” (Too lazy to find and link it). As the OP did not raise that and it’s a bit off track, I won’t restate those arguments, but suffice to say that I determined (in my ancient memory) that your position (as probably wrongly remembered by me) was overly simplistic in concluding (I probably remembered this wrong) that RCC doctrine meant that the Church was basically indifferent, when it came to Salvation, with whether an individual received the RCC version of the Gospel, or with whether anyone should make an effort to ensure that they did.
So I am confused. Sarafeena, from what you have said before it now follows that these individuals are still excommunicated no matter what the Pope says: it is a state created by their actions that has not changed. Yet they are now not excommunicated even if they are still “suspended”. Because a Pope has "unilaterally"changed their status, not because of any declared change in position on their part. They as committed as ever to the concept that Vatican 2 is problematic and their biggest problem with it (according to the Newsweek article) has been its call to deal with Jews and others as something other than enemies, its call that using “coercive power” if need be (as has been used historically) to enforce the truth claims of the Church, is not a Good Thing. Or at least there is no sign that they have recanted from that position.
It seems to contradict your and Tom’s explanations of excommunication - unless I’ve missed something … completely possible.
If you missed anything, it’s probably because the situation is complicated, and a lot easier to understand if you have the right background information. That is, you kind of have to understand the culture & philosophy of the Church. I don’t know a lot about this specific situation. In fact, a few years ago, I was trying to find information about whether this group was officially in schism or not, and even that seemed to be somewhat a matter of interpretation (although now that the Pope has said that they are, I accept that as true). The reason I was interested is because the group happens to have a Church not far from my house, and it’s clearly not associated at all with our Archdiocese.
Anyway, there seem to be a few different terms here that are being confused. First of all, excommunication has to do with their status as Catholics and specifically, whether they are allowed to take Communion. Their status as Bishops is completely separate from that. The reason they are “suspended” is because they were not legitimately elevated to that office in the first place. A simple way to explain this is that, yes, a person’s own actions decides whether they are “in communion” with the Church. However, the Church doesn’t police whether any individual Catholic is in that state or not…they have no way of doing so. Therefore, there are people taking Communion all the time who technically really shouldn’t be doing so. In these situations, it’s basically left up to the person’s own conscience. In order to be “excommunicated” in the sense of being put on the official list, the PTB in Rome have to have the person’s situation brought to their attention. Most of the time (and this is in answer to MaxtheVool as well), the person him or herself brings it to the attention of the Vatican because of a flagrantly public action that he or she chooses to take. That is, I could argue all day long on this message board that women should be allowed to be priests and no one will excommunicate me for it. If I got some priest to ordain me, THEN they probably would do it.
So, these guys may very well still hold the position that they disagree with the reforms of Vatican II, but that doesn’t appear to be why they were excommunicated (I think Tomndebb pointed out that they held that position as priests for 20 years, and were only excommuncated after they were illicitly elevated to bishop). I don’t expect that they will ever change their opinion of Vatican II, and I’m not sure that they will be expected to by the Vatican. However, they will be expected NOT to act as bishops, even if they personally still consider their status as bishop to be valid. So, my understanding of it is not that they need to have recanted their position, but more that they have to have agreed not to act in ways that oppose the Church.
One other thing I think I should try to explain better is the source of the pain or suffering people who have been excommunicated have. The pain isn’t from being at odds with the Church…I’m sure there’s not one excommunicated person right now who didn’t know that they were seriously challenging Church authority. Indeed, as I said before, usually they are very deliberate in what they do, and they do it because of a very strong belief…a passion…that the Church is wrong in a particular area. The pain comes from being cut off from the Eucharist, which is of utmost importance to a devout Catholic. And, yes, a person can very much believe in the “Truth” of the Eucharist without agreeing with the Church on an issue like ordaining women or the Vatican II reforms.
You and I have different understandings of what Protestant means and what bigot means. That does not mean that either of us haven’t researched the topic, only that you don’t accept I have any understanding of it.
For the edification of the Teeming millions, here are the reasons that Luther eventually broke from the Roman Catholic Church http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/web/ninetyfive.html Chief among these reasons were the sale of indulgences, that salvation is based on the Grace of God alone, and not good works. Communion has nothing to do with it. In most Protestant denominations any Christian from any other denomination is welcomed and encouraged to partake of communion. The RCC does not give Communion to Protestant denominations, including Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, etc. And yes, we Protestants do have Communion as a central tenet of the religion. I don’t know what denomination you belong to that doesn’t think that Communion is central, but I suspect that you are wrong about your own denomination. Communion is universal among Christians under the Nicean Creed and universal is interchangeable with the word catholic in this sense. Communion for those that believe in bodily Resurrection is more important than life itself.
Had the RCC under the Medicis not sold indulgences, it is entirely likely that Luther would have sucked it up on everything else and stayed in the Church. And without his leadership and scholarship to back it up we’d probably all still be Catholic and the various offshoots would be as well remembered as the Cathars. This is not intended to overly lionize Martin Luther. He was a very intelligent and strong willed man. But his own differences with Jews he tried to convert led him to write the most influential anti-Jewish tracts in history that led in a more or less straight line to the Holocaust.
I’m not calling the current Pope a bigot for “merely being Catholic” but rather for emphasizing the superiority of Catholics to other religions at virtually every opportunity. The superior attitude is the very definition of bigotry. The remarks about Islam need not have been made. The numerous remarks about how Roman Catholicism is the true Christian religion need not have been made. The revival of the prayer about “perfidious” Jews even softened to “faithless” Jews is grossly bigoted, and in fact it’s anti-Jewish on its face even in the softened form, and still offensive. Now I will concede that most religions think they are better than the others, but the current Pope’s constant rubbing it the face of the whole world is the very definition of bigotry.
When John Paul II was Pope these were the same doctrines, but he virtually never made a point of alienating other religions this way, and the only Vatican pronouncements that did are easily traced back to Ratzinger as head of the office of doctrine. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t the most prominent Christian in the world, he is. But it is unfortunate that the world’s most recognizable and influential Christian is a bigot, or as others have more diplomatically put it, “politically tone deaf”.
And you mistake disagreement as ignorance. I’m not as educated as Tomndebb or Polycarp on religious (esp Catholic) matters, but I know what I’m talking about. You don’t seem to understand the central place that Communion has to all Christians, including Protestants, and you don’t seem to understand what bigotry means or that the Pope should be excused for being rude in the way he takes actions and interprets doctrine. You also seem to think that Catholic Christian doctrine hasn’t changed in two millenia. WTF? Did you miss the Council of Nicea? Augustin? Aquinas? The Council of Trent? Vatican II?
The fact that you and I have completely different understandings of most of these things doesn’t make either of us completely ignorant, just of each other’s point of view.
When offense is given or taken, who defines it as offensive?
The post to which I responded equated two groups taking offense at the actions of the other. I contend that Jews not accepting Jesus is not offensive to Christians, (other than a few outspoken people like Ambrose and Luther who chose to be offended), while the vast majority of Jews would, indeed, find proselytization and attempts at conversion to be offensive. Christians may consider evangelization a solemn duty and engage in that practice with no intent to offend, but I suspect that the targets of that action may have a very different view of it.
