The four Cardinals (and I believe at this stage that there are four more than four supporting the Dubia) are asking for the truth. There is nothing more dangerous to a dishonest man than that he might be asked for once to speak the truth plainly and simply. For lies are the armour in which he defends himself. The Four Cardinals may or may not this as an attack but I believe Bergoglio and hi9s fellow conspirators will see things differently. However I find it difficult to believe that these four Cardinals would be so child like as not to perceive this themselves.
If someone chooses to throw himself of a roof of a building to his death am I guilty of his suicide if I announce it to the world? If a Pope chooses to incur automatic excommunication on himself and thus incur schism am I guilty of his excommunication and the consequent schism by announcing it? Do not shoot the messenger for the message.
I am not intending to defend myself in this matter for an indefinite period of time. Events will themselves show with much more clarity than any words of mine could ever do the rights and wrongs of this affair. I had a moral duty to state these things and I have done so. It will soon be time to move on. I believe the coming year will be quite, quite extraordinary and we will very,very much have others matters to occupy our minds.
Did you read what I wrote? Pope francis is doing what papal authority allows him to do? Please explain your understanding of what those in grave but not mortal sin cannot recieve Holy Communion? It is your judgment on the Pope that he has excommunicated himself -Your judgment! Thats called schism!
The Pope might believe that the majority of Catholic sacramental marriages are invalid. This does not mean that he is right. He cannot know for certain. He is a man not God. As for your theological position it would mean that anyone could approach the table of the Lord - active homosexual 'couples', and all kinds of perverts. Sure it is only 'grave sin'. The modern theologians say it is almost impossible to commit mortal sin. Yet, our Lady showed Hell to the Fatima children and it was full of unrepentant sinners. Mortal sin is real as is Hell. It is easy to have an all inclusive Church when you abolish sin.
Talk about diabolical disorientation. Catholics who are living in adulterous relationships are living in a state of mortal sin. No Pope can change the words of Christ in Sacred Scripture on this matter. I do really pray for Pope Francis because numerous Saints over the centuries have warned that God is dead serious about Papal Infallibility, so much so that if a Pope was plotting to use his office to define error, that God would strike him dead before the act. Infallibility does not ensure the Pope is correct. It means that the Holy Spirit prevents the Pope from defining error. It's literally a life and death issue for the Church as well as the Pope. One example from history illustrates this point. Pope Sixtus V was, in most repects, a very successful pope. He eliminated lawlessnes in northern Italy, re-filled the Vatican treasury by the use of good business sense and gained control of a rambunctious college of cardinals. What he was not was a Latin scholar. Nevertheless, he re-translated the Vulgate. The result was a Bible of errors. He had already issued the bull on his new Vulgate and had it printed. The night before it was to be issued, he died, apparently of natural causes. St. Robert Bellarmine re-re-translated the Vulgate, correctly, and it was issued properly. This example illustrates the protection the Holy Spirit exerts over the Church and the office of the Papacy, to protect them from error in faith and morals. If Pope Francis is planning on using his office to undermine Christ's very words in Sacred Scripture regarding the divorced and remarried, then he is literally playing with fire.
Dear Garabanal and Richard, It doesnt matter what you opinions are, what I have described is the Tradition of the Church. Grave sin is not mortal sin. Thats a fact. Even though Our Lady showed the visionaries of Fatima Hell, Pope St. John Paul II still stated we dont know for sure if anyone (human) is in Hell. Nobody including the Pope is denying the gravity of sin or the reality of Hell or Satan, but God wills that all be saved, and we dont know the subjective guilt of anyone. Is Hitler in Hell ar stalin? Nobody knows, and nobody knows because we don know if they died in an absolute state of mortal sin. I repeat what I said earlier, Cardinal Burke didnt use the phrase mortal sin because he couldnt. People who follow every visionary and so called prophet are asking for trouble every time the Pope- as is his right- changes some disciplinary measure. Why do you think Pope Benedic was so sceptical about apparitions? If you do follow this stuff, you also need to know exactly what the Church teaches, not half truths and then you can sort the wheat from the chaff
I'm guessing that future historians will write that The Church entered a period of Schism when Lavender Marxists hi-jacked Vatican II in the late 60s and why Pope Paul VI made his Smoke of Satan comment in 1972. I have never been a fan of Pope Francis nor do I have a clue as to the whys of his many inexplicable words and actions. The latest of why he refuses to answer reasonable questions from noted/learned Princes of The Church and treats these men as lepers. It has become such a mess that I don't know who The Good Guys are!??... but ... I just fall back on what I have come to believe and that is ... The Storm is here and these people are following a script "written' by the Almighty whether they know it or no. So...... since I don't know who the Human Good Guys are I'll stick with the three that I admire most .... The Father, Jesus and Holy Ghost! I'd suggest that all here do likewise ... and be more concerned about the area within ... say ... 30 miles of your home ... and GET PREPARED!!! GOD SAVE ALL HERE!!! .... and Happy/Merry Feast of Stephen ..... the 2nd Day of Christmas "Good King Wenceslas" - Bing Crosby/Rosemary Clooney
Modern Catholic Dictionary by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. GRAVE SIN. The transgression of a divine law in a grievous matter with full knowledge and consent. The matter may be serious either in itself (as blasphemy) or because of the circumstances (as striking one’s father or mother) or on account of its purpose (as telling a lie in order to destroy a person’s character). Sufficient knowledge of the serious nature of a sinful action is present if one is clearly conscious that the act is mortally sinful, say because the Scriptures or the Church identify certain acts as seriously offensive to God. It is enough that one knows that what one intends to do may be a mortal sin, but does it anyhow. Indifference to the laws of God is equivalent to disobeying them. Full consent is present when one freely wills to commit an action although one clearly knows it is gravely sinful. No sin is committed if one does not will the deed, no matter how clear one’s knowledge may be. After all, the essence of sin is in the free will. Thus, too, a person does not sin who, with the best of will, cannot dispel obscene or blasphemous thoughts and desires, even though he or she well knows they are gravely sinful. The resolution to perform an action is not the same as the pleasure or satisfaction experienced in the emotions, nor the same as a compulsive idea, “I like the sin.” One sign of partial knowledge or not full consent would be the fact that a person does not complete an action when this can easily be done, or is so minded that the person would rather die than commit a grave sin. MORTAL SIN. An actual sin that destroys sanctifying grace and causes the supernatural death of the soul. Mortal sin is a turning away from God because of a seriously inordinate adherence to creatures that causes grave injury to a person's rational nature and to the social order, and deprives the sinner of a right to heaven. The terms mortal, deadly, grave, and serious applied to sin are synonyms, each with a slightly different implication. Mortal and deadly focus on the effects in the sinner, namely deprivation of the state of friendship with God; grave and serious refer to the importance of the matter in which a person offends God. But the Church never distinguishes among these terms as though they represented different kinds of sins. There is only one recognized correlative to mortal sin, and that is venial sin, which offends against God but does not cause the loss of one's state of grace. (Etym. Latin mors, death.)
Christ taught that there will be souls in Hell. You are in grave danger of spiritual blindness. Matthew 13:41-42, 49-50 “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Yes effectively our Moral Creed is rather like a House of Cards. Remove one brick and the whole edifice with come falling down. We have already seen this with our Sisters and Brothers in the Anglican Communion. They are no longer in any real sense of the word Christians. In other words we are taking the first steps on a road that will lead us all to hell, led to the flames by Bergoglio.
Seems to me every person who is sincere about their Catholic faith needs to ask the same following questions to themselves and then you will know where you stand in defending or moderating church doctrine. A doctrine is an unchanging truth all faithful Catholics must hold to. The "dubia" It is asked whether, following the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia (nn. 300-305), it has now become possible to grant absolution in the sacrament of penance and thus to admit to Holy Communion a person who, while bound by a valid marital bond, lives together with a different person more uxorio without fulfilling the conditions provided for by Familiaris Consortio n. 84 and subsequently reaffirmed by Reconciliatio et Paenitentia n. 34 and Sacramentum Caritatis n. 29. Can the expression “in certain cases” found in note 351 (n. 305) of the exhortation Amoris Laetitia be applied to divorced persons who are in a new union and who continue to live more uxorio? After the publication of the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia (cf. n. 304), does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 79, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, on the existence of absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions? After Amoris Laetitia (n. 301) is it still possible to affirm that a person who habitually lives in contradiction to a commandment of God’s law, as for instance the one that prohibits adultery (cf. Mt 19:3-9), finds him or herself in an objective situation of grave habitual sin (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, Declaration, June 24, 2000)? After the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia (n. 302) on “circumstances which mitigate moral responsibility,” does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 81, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, according to which “circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act ‘subjectively’ good or defensible as a choice”? After Amoris Laetitia (n. 303) does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 56, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, that excludes a creative interpretation of the role of conscience and that emphasizes that conscience can never be authorized to legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts by virtue of their object?
Create a mess - indeed what a mess. The Church is in a real mess of messy messiness! One has to retain a sense of humour even in the midst of crisis!
Pope John Paul II in Crossing the Thershold of Hope: " Who will these be [in hell]? The Church has never made any pronouncement in this regard. This is a mystery, truly inscrutable, which embraces the holiness of God and the conscience of man. The silence of the Church is, therefore, the only appropriate position for Christian faith. Even when Jesus says of Judas, the traitor, "It would be better for that man if he had never been born" (Mt 26:24), His words do not allude for certain to eternal damnation." Garabandal, there needs to be a certain disctinction between Jesus' warning about the danger of hell-which is certainly a possibility- and the knowledge that there are definately people there. You cannot say for certain anyone is in there. Go with the Church not your own opinion. Thats why Jp II said we dont know and leave it as a mystery. This does not dimish the gravity of sin for those who take the entire teaching of the Church, but we dont judge those who have already died. Also the Catechism makes a clear distinction between mortal sin and the grave objective matter: " For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."131 1858 Grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments, corresponding to the answer of Jesus to the rich young man: "Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and your mother."132 The gravity of sins is more or less great: murder is graver than theft. One must also take into account who is wronged: violence against parents is in itself graver than violence against a stranger. 1859 Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God's law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart133 do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin. 1860 Unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense. But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man. the promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders. Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest. Objective grave sin does not not take into account knowledhe and consent. There will be thousands of catholics committing objective grave sins but who are still in a state of grace. It may be to you a very small distinction, but one that is the difference between grace and spiritual death-and that in a nutshell is what Pope Francis is saying.
The Church may not have made a definitive judgement about who is in Hell or not. Burt Christ spoke clearly. Jesus wasn't warning anyone in these verses. He was telling the future. It was a prophetic utterance. You can ignore Christ all you want. But I wont.
The reality is, Julia, that for centuries there has been pressure on the Church to change its teaching on marriage and sexual morality. The divisions over ABC started, if my memory serves me, in the Jesuit Notre Dame University in the US and spread worldwide thanks to priests/bishops/theologians who claimed to believe all that the Church teaches while encouraging dissent among the Catholics in their pastoral care at a time when the vast majority of Catholics actually believed that to receive the Eucharist while not being in a state of grace was to commit sacrilege. We only have to look around us to see how right Pope Paul was. Those priests and theologians got away with their disobedience to the Pope and some of them rose through the ranks of the Church, continuing to ignore the authority of successive Popes until they got one they agree with. All this talk about bringing the Church into the modern world (breeding like rabbits/the majority of sacramental marriages being invalid/two people living together but not married for superstitious reasons have a genuine marriage/there can be good in a sodomite union) can be traced back to the open dissent followed by disregard for Humanae Vitae. Those priests didn't trust in God (assuming that they actually believed in God) and now everything they did under the radar is being incorporated into official pastoral practice. They professed officially then to believe in Doctrine while undermining it in practice. People who have embraced their beliefs and profess officially now to believe in Doctrine are in positions where they can render the same Doctrine irrelevant in official pastoral practice. They are using Luther's excuse about the primacy of conscience, however ill informed or self-conditioned, to abolish the very concept of sin for all things except giving to the poor, which will turn the Church into a universal NGO with a veneer of Christianity. It will turn us into a Church where Sacraments are no more than a quaint cultural inheritance. Infant baptism is permitted because the Church expects that the children will be raised in the faith. Nobody expects that any more and while Baptism does, in fact, confer Sanctifying Grace, the follow up requirement of helping children to grow in God's grace is ignored. Primacy of conscience will, as in Protestantism, eliminate the need for the Sacrament of Reconciliation under the guise of having "a personal relationship with God". Holy Orders will give us Priests who daren't correct people for fear of lacking mercy and appearing rigid and judgemental. Matrimony, the Sacrament that underpins the stability of families and the wider society is already being treated as a joke. There are already Bishops using the pastoral approach encouraged in AL to administer the Sacrament of Extreme Unction to people who have chosen to end their lives by assisted suicide. With the abolition of a need to repent and mend our ways, where all dissent is treated as invincible ignorance, anybody who shows up will be eligible to receive the Eucharist (the source and summit of our faith) without any consideration of whether they are eating or drinking damnation upon themselves. That's six of the seven Sacraments of the Church undermined in the name of "merciful" pastoral practice. What kind of faith will the Sacrament of Confirmation confirm people in? A faith that makes God into an image and likeness of ourselves, which is a kind of idolatry. That's all seven Sacraments undermined. Jesus corrected what Moses did under pressure from the hardness of people's hearts. He didn't give anyone the authority to repeat Moses' mistake. The same Jesus who told us not to cast stones also said "if you love me, keep my commandments" and spelled out very clearly that a man commits adultery in his heart if he so much as looks lustfully at a woman who is not his lawful wife. That "prize for the perfect" remark is no more than a spurious attack on what the Church has always taught about the requirement to be in a state of grace for reception of Communion........requirements introduced to protect us from the ramifications of eating unworthily - hence the requirement to repent and at least have a firm intention to mend our ways. We aren't being told to break the Commandments - we are being told that God's actual grace isn't enough for some people in irregular unions to keep God's commandments so the Church will dispense with the need for them to keep the 6th Commandment so long as they can convince a priest that a Church Tribunal is in error or unnecessary. I would be very surprised if Pope Francis believes in any Illumination or Warning. If he did, he would spend more time preaching the Truth to his atheist friends, he wouldn't promote an unrepentant abortionist as a role model, and would spend less time making scathing attacks on Catholics trying to live the faith that until now has been handed down intact by better men than him, many of whom considered the Eucharist and the Doctrine of Marriage worth dying for.
