Friday, March 29, AD 2024 11:03am

PopeWatch: Fifty Shades of Gray

Pope Francis continues on his course of ensuring that traditional Catholic moral teachings is watered down into useless pap:

Pope Francis told a group of newly ordained bishops that “authentic discernment” cannot be reduced to repeating “rigid” moral formulas to persons whose situations “can’t be reduced to black and white.”Discernment, the pope said, “can’t be reduced to repeating formulas such as ‘high clouds send little rain’ to a concrete person, who’s often immersed in a reality that can’t be reduced to black and white.”

He cautioned bishops against being “imprisoned by nostalgia for being able to give just one answer to apply in all cases,” adding that discernment is an “antidote against rigidity, because the same solutions aren’t valid everywhere.” 

Pastors must have “the courage to ask themselves if yesterday’s proposals are still evangelically valid,” he said. 

Pope Francis’ made his comments Thursday morning to newly appointed bishops from around the world. They met at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace as part of an annual training program offered by the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops. 

During the meeting, Pope Francis advised the bishops to consult three specific groups — his brother bishops, his own priests, and the lay faithful — when discerning.

Go here to read the rest.  This sad pontificate reminds PopeWatch of this quotation from CS Lewis:

 

It is your duty to to fix the lines (of doctrine) clearly in your minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession. This is your duty not specially as Christians or as priests but as honest men. There is a danger here of the clergy developing a special professional conscience which obscures the very plain moral issue. Men who have passed beyond these boundary lines in either direction are apt to protest that they have come by their unorthodox opinions honestly. In defense of those opinions they are prepared to suffer obloquy and to forfeit professional advancement. They thus come to feel like martyrs. But this simply misses the point which so gravely scandalizes the layman. We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held: what we complain of is your continuing in your ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative Party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of the other.

 

 

 

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Phillip
Phillip
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 3:47am

“He cautioned bishops against being ‘imprisoned by nostalgia for being able to give just one answer to apply in all cases,’ adding that discernment is an ‘antidote against rigidity, because the same solutions aren’t valid everywhere.’”

This from the man who has one note in regard to immigration, war, global warming etc.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 4:00am

Pope Francis told a group of newly ordained bishops that “authentic discernment” cannot be reduced to repeating “rigid” moral formulas to persons whose situations “can’t be reduced to black and white.”Discernment, the pope said, “can’t be reduced to repeating formulas such as ‘high clouds send little rain’ to a concrete person, who’s often immersed in a reality that can’t be reduced to black and white.”

Persons who’s situations can’t be reduced to black and white?

Authentic discernment is throwing in the towel to cultural fashions that have always been sinful in the past…but now are seen in a grey area.

Please pardon my assumptions if they are missing the mark.

It sounds like personal conscience, formed or not, is the guidepost. What a roadmap to disaster. Fifty shades of grey! Good title.
Bad policy.

bob kurland
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 4:40am

This is what is called relativism. It will not attract converts to the Church; rather, what need for the Church if it does not support a beautiful liturgy and moral standards. Sigh… How long, O Lord, how long.
Let me examine the proposition that the Holy Spirit guides the election of a pope. If this be true, then what is the purpose of the Holy Spirit in selecting this pope?

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 4:45am

How did this man become a priest?

Don L
Don L
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 4:49am

As each of us know with certitude (sorry for the rather rigid word) the tablets Moses brought to the people of God were pastoral messages of mercy softly carved in multiple shades of “pick your own flavor” of gray.
JPII said to call black, black, white, white and sin, sin, while Francis calls doing that “rigid,”

Father of Seven
Father of Seven
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 5:08am

He just told them all to become Protestants. Your quote from CS Lewis is spot on.

TomD
TomD
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 6:19am

More rigidity about avoiding rigidity.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 6:24am

“Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine’, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, April 18, 2005

http://www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html

“As I urged you when I was going to Macedo′nia, remain at Ephesus that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the divine training that is in faith; whereas the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith.”

1st Timothy 1:3-5

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.”

2nd Timothy 4:3-4

Lord Jesus, save us from this Argentinian Marxist Peronist heretic! May he be deposed and anathematized with all due alacrity!

Dale Price
Dale Price
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 11:00am

A man who rants incessantly about the dangers of rigorism in the 2017 Church is like a principal at a failing school who is constantly warning against the perils of studying too much.

trackback
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 12:09pm

[…] FRANCISDISCERNMENT AND THE ENEMY […]

Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 2:07pm

Aye. Francis may be a kamikaze (Steve Skojec’s interpretation) or he may be completely divorced from social reality, a man who keeps running a tape of some time and place in his life which is no more. The third option, that Francis is like any other burnt out cleric you’ve known sits rather ill on a man who managed to be promoted within the ranks so often.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 2:08pm

I’m fascinated to know what I’ve done or said which got me put on moderation.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Friday, September 15, AD 2017 5:27pm

Art.
The t r u e reason you were put on moderation is because your comments about the Pope were….too rigid. ?

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Saturday, September 16, AD 2017 4:25am

To avoid moral rigidity I am dismissing any concern to adhere to the [virtually unintelligible] blather pouring out of this soon-to-be-behind-us pontificate.

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