The Synod And Our Approach To Gay People

[BarbTherese]

God will Judge with Mercy those who through exterior pressures beyond their control have abandoned The Faith, of this I am convinced.  Only mortal sin can separate a soul from The Lord and His Church............ONLY mortal sin.

[Nihil Obstat]

God will Judge with Mercy those who through exterior pressures beyond their control have abandoned The Faith, of this I am convinced.  Only mortal sin can separate a soul from The Lord and His Church............ONLY mortal sin.

Certainly. But I think it would be imprudent to minimize the fact that access to the sacraments plays a critical role in bringing souls to repentance.

[BarbTherese]

Certainly. But I think it would be imprudent to minimize the fact that access to the sacraments plays a critical role in bringing souls to repentance.

 

Won't argue with that.........spot on to me.

The Church and the access to the Sacraments play a critical and necessary role in bringing us to repentance and holiness and keeping us there.......every single day of our journey - which sinners need.    Is faithful membership of The Church and faithful attendance of The Sacraments the only means of salvation, daily repentance and holiness therefore? No, I don't think so.  Yet mysteriously and faithfully I hold absolutely that there is no salvation outside The Church.  Is that a paradox?  I always have trouble seeing the paradoxical at the best of times.

The Church is at once also and for one the Mystical Body of Christ on earth in Her overt everyday human functioning on all levels - and at the one and same time something hidden, mystical, mysterious and transcends human understanding and certainly our human sense perceptions.

 

Edited October 20, 2014 by BarbaraTherese

[Nihil Obstat]

Won't argue with that.........spot on to me.

The Church and the access to the Sacraments play a critical and necessary role in bringing us to repentance and holiness and keeping us there.......every single day of our journey - which sinners need.    Is faithful membership of The Church and faithful attendance of The Sacraments the only means of salvation, daily repentance and holiness therefore? No, I don't think so.  Yet mysteriously and faithfully I hold absolutely that there is no salvation outside The Church.  Is that a paradox?  I always have trouble seeing the paradoxical at the best of times.

The Church is at once also and for one the Mystical Body of Christ on earth in Her overt everyday human functioning on all levels - and at the one and same time something hidden, mystical, mysterious and transcends human understanding and certainly our human sense perceptions.

I think it would be fair to say that it is the only ordinary means of salvation.

[BarbTherese]

Agree again...........it is the ordinary means.

[superblue]

I do not think this should be so hard to understand. All mankind is called to cooperate with the Holy Ghost. The pope just as much as you or I. Priests and bishops are given special graces to teach and lead, but these graces are only efficacious to the extent that they actually cooperate in due manner.

The pope simply has an extra part on top of that, in very limited situations, where he is protected in a more direct way from error. 

Should a pope choose not to cooperate with the Holy Ghost then he, like any other priest or layperson, will have relatively impaired access to those graces God offers him. Yes, such a pope would be protected from error when he exercises his infallibility, but short of those situations - and they are rare - his free will is just as unimpaired as yours is.

 

 

Your're not telling me anything i don't already know, it is the utter fear people are showing towards this synod and the utter fear and worries that some how the Church is going to collapse, then people are acting as if what is being proposed would lead to the destruction of the church is what i am getting at and i understand that the sarcasim gets lost online,

 

but then you have people who belly ache about what a heresy is in all of this, as if anything that anyone is proposing in the Synod would really destroy the Church,  Heresy is thrown around as if it is free candy to everyone.   When someone starts proclaiming that perhaps Christ really is not divine, or that perhaps our faith is all just smoke and mirrors then i'll get on the heresy band wagon and start wondering what is going on .   But to see the Church go from persecuting and labeling Galileo a " heretic " for stating that the earth revolved around the sun, and the Church knew they were right because " scripture said so "  to later turn around and go, uh oh,  to now this day in age, where the issues at hand are for some reason just insane and people are expecting the moon to turn blood red.... come on.

 

This Synod is nothing to get worked up about,  either way it goes, no one is spouting anything close to heresy, dogmas can change, all the heresy talk is already said and done,  the only thing that matters is Christ and what He has done for us, everything else is trivial at best and a waste a of time at most to be worried over.  WORRIED OVER, debate it all day long.

 

So again just breezing over the fact that people are happy go lucky when no one rocks the boat and then to scream bloody murder when the boat starts to rock is what is going on here, and again, everyone is more than happy to praise the Holy Spirit when things are going right, and then just as you have pointed out , throw down the obvious answer when things start to go wrong and all of a sudden it is no no no the Holy Spirit and God are just being ignored is all it is.

 

you're right it isn't hard to understand.

[BarbTherese]

Two interesting observations:

 

 

Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) – a ‘prophesy’ from his book in 1969 “Faith and The Future” http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/Interiorlife/iloo13.htm

 

Pope John Paul II Apostolic Exhortation “Reconciliation and Penance” echoing in part Cardinal Ratzinger’s ‘prophesy’.  Scroll to Paragraph 9 (second paragraph) “…….(even though it were only “the little flock” of the first days)..” http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_02121984_reconciliatio-et-paenitentia_en.html

 

None of the above is written in stone or are they any sort of infallible statements.  Nor are they an undermining of The Church’s brief and mission from Jesus “go into the whole world and proclaim The Gospel to every creature” and for us potentially to experience all the pain and suffering with divisions in The Church and maybe even a loss of membership along with matters foreseen as a potential by Cardinal Ratzinger in 1969 and then echoed in part by Pope John Paul II in his Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation.

 

What the above links do indicate for me is that The Holy Spirit will indeed lead where He May as He May - our task is to follow faithfully and with trustful confidence.  "The Gates of Hell shall not prevail"................"behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world".

[Amppax]

Ugh. Why are people allowed to talk about Galileo? 

[KnightofChrist]

From Bishop Tobin: Random Thoughts About the Synod on the Family

 

– It’s an enormous challenge to maintain pristine doctrinal purity while at the same time respond to the experiential, personal, and difficult needs of married couples and families. Behind every arcane discussion of gradualism and natural law there are parents and children awaiting God’s grace.

 

— In trying to accommodate the needs of the age, as Pope Francis suggests, the Church risks the danger of losing its courageous, counter-cultural, prophetic voice, a voice that the world needs to hear.

— The concept of having a representative body of the Church voting on doctrinal applications and pastoral solutions strikes me as being rather Protestant.

 

— In addressing contemporary issues of marriage and the family, the path forward will probably be found somewhere between the positions of Fr. Z and the National Catholic Reporter.

— Have we learned that it’s probably not a good idea to publish half-baked minutes of candid discussions about sensitive topics, especially when we know that the secular media will hijack the preliminary discussions for their own agendas?

 

— I wonder what the Second Vatican Council would have looked like and what it would have produced if the social media had existed at that time.

 

— Pope Francis encouraged fearless and candid discussion and transparency during the Synod. I wonder if the American Bishops will adopt the same protocol during their meeting next month in Baltimore.

 

— Wherever he serves, Cardinal Burke will be a principled, articulate and fearless spokesman for the teachings of the Church.

 

— Pope Francis is fond of “creating a mess.” Mission accomplished.

 

— Relax. God’s still in charge.

Edited October 22, 2014 by KnightofChrist

[BarbTherese]

I LOL and really liked this post from futurepacker in another thread:

 

"Any time I'm thinking the Church is going to hell in a hand basket, I remember this quote:

 

Napoleon Bonaparte: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?”

 

Cardinal: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

 

 

 And I agree with KnightofChrist - "Relax, God is still in charge".  ...................."My Peace I GIVE to you, not as the world gives it".  We already have His Peace, no might shall or maybe about it.  The only way we can loose His Peace is if we choose to do so for one reason or another.

[Benedictus]

Also y'all are missing my point. I'm not arguing about whether the trad liturgy wars are important or not, I'm saying that I think the next Pope will be from Asia or Africa and in those two continents very few people are concerned with that kind of thing, as evidenced by the near complete absence of the Traditional Latin Mass in those places. 

 

I think that's a fair point. Traditional liturgical matters are mostly aspects that concern the 'old' Catholic countries. Most new and growing Catholic countries don't have a history of fixation with traditional liturgy. They also have different priorities, such as pastoral, cultural and material needs. The OF is seen as usual and a means of expressing simplicity. Brazil, and other countries, are dealing with newer movements as well, especially the Charismatic and neocatechumenal expression of mass. The EF doesn't lend itself to this expression, and I've never seen it within these contexts.

Edited October 24, 2014 by Benedictus

[superblue]

Ugh. Why are people allowed to talk about Galileo? 

 

 

It sucks doesn't it, when the only answer is, woops, and then all of a sudden it is well that was the early church, and times were different, and all the excuses come piling up . Why not talk about the life of Galileo, he contributed a lot to the world, and in return the Church treated him as if he came straight out of hell.

 

So to think that maybe perhaps the church does get things wrong from time to time, becomes this, big friggin gasp of, astonishment and fingerpointing how dare thees come out, and then to excuse away the mistakes the church has made to only then say well the current mistakes the church is making in certain regards is okay, but if any cardinal, or pope ever changes anything, then ipsofacto we have a heretic, much like Galileo.

 

It is so full of irony how as Catholics some decide to pick and choose which facts of history they want to acknowledge and then come up with excuses as to why certain things happened.

[Amppax]

It smells of elderberries doesn't it, when the only answer is, woops, and then all of a sudden it is well that was the early church, and times were different, and all the excuses come piling up . Why not talk about the life of Galileo, he contributed a lot to the world, and in return the Church treated him as if he came straight out of hell.

 

So to think that maybe perhaps the church does get things wrong from time to time, becomes this, big friggin gasp of, astonishment and fingerpointing how dare thees come out, and then to excuse away the mistakes the church has made to only then say well the current mistakes the church is making in certain regards is okay, but if any cardinal, or pope ever changes anything, then ipsofacto we have a heretic, much like Galileo.

 

It is so full of irony how as Catholics some decide to pick and choose which facts of history they want to acknowledge and then come up with excuses as to why certain things happened.

 

No, sorry, you misunderstood. I've got a degree in history, and it's frustrating to see people use Galileo as a stick to beat the Church. Because when people do, it pretty much guarantees that they haven't actually studied the issue. The typical narrative was constructed during the nineteenth century by liberal Protestant historians. Modern historian's research does not fault the Church like those historians did. 

[PhuturePriest]

Cardinal Muller speaks out about the Synod and fellow Bishops: http://torontocatholicwitness.blogspot.com/2014/10/breaking-news-caridnal-muller-speaks.html?spref=fb

 

"...unfortunately, there are representatives of the Church, and even bishops who have allowed themselves to be somehow blinded by a secularized society in which they have been so influenced that it has drawn them away from the main topic or from the teachings of the Church based on revelation."

[HisChildForever]

Cardinal Muller speaks out about the Synod and fellow Bishops: http://torontocatholicwitness.blogspot.com/2014/10/breaking-news-caridnal-muller-speaks.html?spref=fb

 

"...unfortunately, there are representatives of the Church, and even bishops who have allowed themselves to be somehow blinded by a secularized society in which they have been so influenced that it has drawn them away from the main topic or from the teachings of the Church based on revelation."

 

You know, I was wondering how an unorthodox bishop or cardinal made it that far in the hierarchy. I guess it makes more sense that they changed over time rather than they were always like that.