Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

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d9popov
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Re: Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

Post by d9popov »

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC REVOLUTION INITIATED BY THEOLOGIANS AND BISHOPS,
AND SUPPORTED BY THE WORST POPE EVER

The previous posting consisted of (1) my own composition [no plagiarism!!!]; (2) excerpts from a webpage cited correctly (not the entire webpage, significant parts of the full page were not reproduced); and (3) another proper citation to another article (not quoted at all). Each of the three was properly separated and labeled. U.S. law protects people's rights to excerpt, quote from, comment upon, agree with, and strongly criticize copyrighted materials. There was no infringement of anyone's rules.


Below, Ross Douthat admits clearly what has long been obvious: (1) the radical changes in Roman Catholicism were initiated by theologians and bishops; (2) the German bishops today want to push the revolution in a more radical direction; and (3) Pope Francis agrees, at least in part, with the German Catholic revolutionaries.

ADMISSIONS FROM ROSS DOUTHAT,
Full article at https://nyti.ms/2FWOzSP

.... .... It was the [Roman Catholic] leadership that embraced a different approach, in which Catholic Christianity would seek to enter more fully into modern culture, adopting its styles and habits — modernist and even brutalist church architecture, casual dress, guitar music, a general suburban and Protestant affect, etc. — in order to effectively transform it from within. It was the leadership that decided that much of what Proust depicted as Catholicism’s cultural glory — the old Mass above all, but also a host of customs and costumes and rituals — needed to be retired in order to reach people in a more disenchanted age. ... ... Catholicism’s attempt to do the same with modern culture since the 1960s has largely seemed to fail. The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. ........ .... on many other fronts, the Francis era has been a springtime for accommodation and inculturation, and especially for the secularizing and Protestantizing German Catholicism that helped forge the original revolution of the 1960s, and whose leaders believe that only further modernization can refill their empty churches. Under German influence, but with the pope’s implicit blessing, Catholic rules on divorce and now perhaps intercommunion may be joining the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays on the altar of sacrifices to the culture of the modern world. .... For this, as for his doctrine-shaking innovations, Francis has won admiring press. But as with the last wave of Catholic revolution, there is little evidence that the modernizing project makes moderns into Catholics. (The latest Gallup data, for instance, shows American Mass attendance declining faster in the Francis era.).... ....

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Barbara
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Re: Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

Post by Barbara »

That's a good description of the recent era: should be on the front page of the National Catholic Register for every Catholic to read and realize how badly off track the entire Church became.

So Mass attendance has declined faster under the evil Francis ? But no one in that hierarchy gets the message still ? And worse, are trying to push it all the more radically ?
Perhaps some of the number who are no longer attending Mass are doing so because they are repelled by Francis and his era.

PS - I like that description of the appallingly ugly modern church "architecture" as 'brutally'. That word strikes the exact right note to convey the sometimes shockingly discordant style of the last half century of American Catholic church buildings.

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RaphaCam
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Re: Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

Post by RaphaCam »

Francis is, IMHO, just how Popes will look in the long run if the world lasts enough for that. The evil seeds of the Papacy started long ago and were slowly built up over time until everything exploded under Paul VI. He was definitely far more ruptural than Francis, but many other should be blamed such as Adrian II or Pius IX. The Papacy had some very vicious men in a worldly sense, such as John XII and Leo X, but these men probably didn't care enough about Christ to hurt their churches with heresy.

Madison Grant
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Re: Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

Post by Madison Grant »

So I was browsing The Drudge Report this morning and this story was featured in the main banner:

Juan Carlos Cruz claims that his suffering was ignored by a number of Latin American bishops who used his homosexuality to brand him a liar when he spoke out.

Speaking to Spanish newspaper El País, Cruz said: “He [the Pope] told me, ‘Juan Carlos, that you are homosexual does not matter.

“God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care
.

“The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.”

The Pope’s words signal a much more open and inclusive approach by the often restrictive faith – a move which will likely upset many conservative Catholics.

The Vatican has neither confirmed nor denied the comments the Pontiff’s comments to Cruz.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6337719/p ... loves-you/

The more I read through the late Father Edward Schillebeeckx's first of two books on biblical exegesis (Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, 1974) the more I believe, or better yet, the more I understand where Pope Francis is coming from, both he and his predecessors going back to Pope Saint John XXIII. Jesus was a simple man that walked the Earth a long long time ago and only later did he, or better yet, his followers, who really never met him but only heard things about him, that he then became divine in the minds of later generations.

Because he was a simple man without divinity then his miracles may be called into question; and, not only his miracles but also every other saying or teaching attributed to him. The perennial question then becomes: who was this man and would this man recognize the things done and said in his name throughout the last two thousand years in every generation and in every nation?

Because the academic presupposition may affirm his answer in the negative then it becomes safe to proceed to dismantle, or make mutable the immutable, the New Testament and every moral, disciplinary, and doctrinal creed in every Christian denomination in every generation and in every nation.

This is what they believe.

Cue the 20th century's Ecumenical Movement because, to them, nothing matters.

Justice
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Re: Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

Post by Justice »

We should be wary of The Sun as it’s a gossip website.

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Barbara
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Re: Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

Post by Barbara »

Yes, I was going to say that the story could be questionable, as the UK Sun is kind of trashy. On the other hand they may publish sensational stories that others have missed.

That remark was out-of-the-world horrible. I certainly hope the sentiments expressed were exaggerated or entirely invented. But with this character, one only hears more and more shocking news as time goes on.

What happened to Pope Francis' purported wish to retire in a year or two ? Certainly 2 or 3 years have passed since he told reporters about that plan not once, but twice or so.

Francis' Exit Stage Left is way overdue.

d9popov
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Re: Is Francis the Worst Pope Ever?

Post by d9popov »

Madison Grant wrote:

The more I read through the late Father Edward Schillebeeckx's first of two books on biblical exegesis (Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, 1974) the more I believe, or better yet, the more I understand where Pope Francis is coming from, both he and his predecessors going back to Pope Saint John XXIII. Jesus was a simple man that walked the Earth a long long time ago and only later did he, or better yet, his followers, who really never met him but only heard things about him, that he then became divine in the minds of later generations.

Because he was a simple man without divinity then his miracles may be called into question; and, not only his miracles but also every other saying or teaching attributed to him. ... This is what they believe. ... Cue the 20th century's Ecumenical Movement because, to them, nothing matters.

Schillebeeckx was a high-IQ man, but not spiritually wise. He was part of the process in which liberal Protestant biblical criticism and historical skepticism was infused into Roman Catholic theology. Today, John P. Meier, although not as radical as some, is also doing something similarly bad on "Historical Jesus" research. We, as Orthodox, need to learn about the earliest history of our Church: the letters of Saint Paul as historical sources, the four authentic Gospels based on eyewitness testimony, the Desposynoi (family relatives of the Lord Jesus Christ who survived into the second century), the fact that the apostles ordained bishops in apostolic succession, and so many late first century and second century sources: Didache, Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Ignatius, Barnabas, Papias, Hermas, Quadratus, Matthetes to Diognetus, Justin, Athenagoras, Aristides, Theophilus of Antioch ("Trinity"), Aristo of Pella, Aristion, Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Abercius, Tertullian, the Scillatan Martyrs, etc. The historical texts are numerous that support the historicity of Christ's resurrection and other miracles witnessed by Christ's relatives, friends, disciples, and even non-believers (his step brother James and the persecutor Paul ). There are so many texts that witness to the historical fact that the early Christians prayed to Christ as God (centuries before Arius). The early Christian belief in the Godhood of Christ is well established in these texts. For many of these texts, there is wide agreement among Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, and atheist scholars on the approximate date of writing. There truly is a cloud of historical witnesses to the Orthodox Christian faith in the first two centuries, including its miraculous and divine aspect. If we educate our children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, in some of this history, they will be able to rebut the propaganda in the secular media, and even to rebut learned propagandists like Schillebeeckx, Morton Smith, Meier, Funk, Crossan, Pagels, Karen King, etc. I have tried to post a tiny fraction of this evidence in the thread on the fake Gospel of Barnabas.

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