Francis: Learn from the meekness of plants

 

 

My response here

Francis gets it wrong...The Church is without sin

The Herald Bulletin is reporting that Francis, speaking to youth about priests who have sexually abused minors, said that: "The weariness of hope comes from seeing a church wounded by her own sin..."

Francis is wrong.

In these times of scandal it is critical to remember that the Church remains spotless even when Her members sin. There is absolutely no doubt that the human history of the Church, like all of human history, has its dark pages. But if anyone cares to take an objective look at this history, one must quickly acknowledge that the doctrine of the Church has always implicitly condemned abuses introduced by Her members.

In the words of Dr. Dietrich Von Hildebrand, "There were sinners in the Church yesterday and there are sinners in the Church today. But the Church Herself, in her divine teaching, emerges gloriously unspotted in a history stained by human weaknesses, errors, imperfections, and sins."

In the words of the great Cardinal Journet:

"All contradictions are eliminated as soon as we understand that the members of the Church do indeed sin, but they do so by their betraying the Church. The Church is thus not without sinners, but She is without sin. The Church as person is responsible for penance. She is not responsible for sins....The members of the Church themselves - laity, clerics, priests, Bishops, and Popes - who disobey the Church are responsible for their sins, but the Church as person is not responsible...It is forgotten that the Church as person is the Bride of Christ, 'Whom He has purchased with His own blood.'" (Acts 20:28).

College students: I hate President Trump's State of the Union Address and I think it was racist...even though it hasn't been delivered yet

Cabot Phillips writes:

"This Tuesday, President Donald Trump will give his first State Of The Union address to the nation.

Critics of Trump have already begun to express displeasure with his actions in the days leading up to the speech, leading some to wonder whether this opposition is substantive, or rooted in a distaste of Trump as a person.

Wanting to find out, Campus Reform headed to New York University to ask students their opinions of President Trump’s State of the Union. The only problem for them was that the speech would not take place for another seven days…

Would that stop them from giving strong, condemnatory opinions on the speech?

See for yourself."

Watch the video and witness the herd mentality which is representative of many of today's college students.

Philip Johnson, in his book "Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture, tells a story which is both amusing and frightening at the same time. He writes: "I am convinced that conscious dishonesty is much less important in intellectual matters than self-deception...The German biologist Bruno Muller-Hill tells a memorable story to illustrate his thesis that 'self-deception plays an astonishing role in science in spite of all the scientists' worship of truth':

When I was a student in a German gymnasium and thirteen years old, I learned a lesson that I have not forgotten...One early morning our physics teacher placed a telescope in the school yard to show us a certain planet and its moons. So we stood in a long line, about forty of us. I was standing at the end of the line, since I was one of the smallest students. The teacher asked the first student whether he could see the planet. No, he had difficulties, because he was nearsighted. The teacher showed him how to adjust the focus, and that student could finally see the planet and the moons. Others had no difficulty; they saw them right away. The students saw, after a while, what they were supposed to see. Then the student standing just before me - his name was Harter - announced that he could not see anything. 'You idiot,' shouted the teacher, 'you have to adjust the lenses.' The student did that and said after a while, 'I do not see anything, it is all black.' The teacher then looked through the telescope himself. After some seconds he looked up with a strange expression on his face. And then my comrades and I also saw that the telescope was nonfunctioning; it was closed by a cover over the lens. Indeed, no one could see anything through it.'

Muller-Hill reports that one of the docile students became a professor of philosophy and director of a German TV station. 'This might be expected,' he wickedly comments. But another became a professor of physics, and a third a professor of botany. The honest Harter had to leave school and go to work in a factory. If in later life he was ever tempted to question any of the pronouncements of his more illustrious classmates, I am sure he was firmly told not to meddle in matters beyond his understanding.'" (pp. 156-157).

Do we honestly believe that this herd mentality is not to be found throughout our society and even in the Church? If so, we deceive ourselves. Pope Benedict XVI has warned of a liberal notion of conscience which is nothing less than a retreat from truth. In a keynote address of the Tenth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on "Catholic Conscience: Foundation and Formation," he says that liberalism's idea of conscience is that: "Conscience does not open the way to the redemptive road to truth - which either does not exist or, if it does, is too demanding. It is the faculty that dispenses with truth. It thereby becomes the justification for subjectivity, which would not like to have itself called into question. Similarly, it becomes the justification for social conformity. As mediating value between the different subjectivities, social conformity is intended to make living together possible. The obligation to seek the truth terminates, as do any doubts about the general inclination of society and what it has become accustomed to. Being convinced of oneself, as well as conforming to others, is sufficient. Man is reduced to his superficial conviction, and the less depth he has, the better for him."

Is there really any difference between Harter's classmates, who insisted that they could see a planet and its moons when such was impossible, and those who succumb to social conformity and insist that an unborn baby is not really a human being when all the scientific evidence suggests otherwise?

Are today's college students being prepared to think critically or simply to mindlessly regurgitate what their far-left liberal professors tell them to believe and/or what the far-left mainstream media reports?

What do you think?

Related reading: here.

Dr. Bandy Lee, anxious to diagnose President Trump without ever having examined him, has violated medical ethics

From Newsweek:


"President Donald Trump’s mental health might lead to the extinction of the human species, the Yale psychiatrist briefing lawmakers on the president's psychological state told Newsweek on Friday.

If it were possible, Dr. Bandy Lee said, 'we would be declaring a public health emergency that needs to be responded to as quickly as possible.'


'As more time passes, we come closer to the greatest risk of danger, one that could even mean the extinction of the human species,' she said. 'This is not hyperbole. This is the reality.”'

After a series of tweets from Trump that appeared to threaten North Korea with nuclear war, Lee and hundreds of her colleagues at the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts issued a statement calling into question his mental health and psychological fitness for the presidency.

Dr. Lee has violated one of the principles of medical ethics formulated by the American Psychiatric Association and should be held accountable for her actions.


"On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media.
In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional 
opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement."  See here.

Dr. Lee is most unprofessional.  She should be fired and her license to practice subjected to review.

Francis: God cannot be God without us?

And now Francis, the brilliant theologian, is asserting that God cannot be God without us.  See here.

Wrong.  God has no need for human beings. "The God who made the world and everything in it … is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything" (Acts 17:24-25).

God did not make us because he was lonely. Long before we were here, God already had "company" with his Son and the Holy Spirit, referred to in Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man in our own image."

And he didn't make us because he needed to satiate His ego. He did not make us to satisfy some craving to be worshiped. God is totally secure in who he is—without us.

But, despite not needing us, God chose to create us anyway, out of his great love: "I have loved you with an everlasting love" (Jeremiah 31:3).

God loved us before he even created us. He loved us with an "everlasting" love.

God is love (1 John 4:8), and because of that love and his wonderful creativity, he made us so we can enjoy all that he is and all that he's done.  He created us, as the Baltimore Catechism reminds us, to "know, love and serve" Him.

God created us to fulfill his eternal plan.  But, He doesn't need us.  And even if He had never created us, He would still be God.

God has always been.  He has always been God.  Francis is saying that, before we were created, He wasn't God.

Time to depose Francis?

Pope Francis: Do you want to pray the Creed?

Dorothy Sayers, in her classic work Creed or Chaos, reminds us that, "The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man — and the dogma is the drama.

That drama is summarised quite clearly in the creeds of the Church, and if we think it dull it is because we either have never really read those amazing documents, or have recited them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning.  The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: What think ye of Christ?

The Church's answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God "by Whom all things were made."  His body and brain were those of a common man; His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms.  He was not a kind of dæmon or fairy pretending to be human; He was in every respect a genuine living man.  He was not merely a man so good as to be "like God" — He was God…This is the dogma we find so dull — this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero.

If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be called exciting?  The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore — on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe.  It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him "meek and mild," and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.  To those who knew Him, however, He in no way suggested a milk-and-water person; they objected to Him as a dangerous firebrand."

For authentic Christians then, the Creeds are essential.  They are our response to the question, "What think ye of Christ?"

But for Pope Francis, the Creed seems to be of little importance.  As related here, when challenged on some of his views (which many consider far to the left), Francis responded, "..if they want me to recite the Creed, I can!"

First of all, the Creed is a prayer.  It should be prayed and not simply recited.  Secondly, we should possess the desire to pray the Creed, and not simply recite it as some sort of formula to convince others that we really believe.

It was Archbishop Fulton Sheen who cautioned, "The modern man must decide for himself whether he is going to have a religion with thought or a religion without it. He already knows that thoughtless policies lead to the ruin of society, and he may begin to suspect that thoughtless religion ends in confusion worse confounded.

The problem is simple. The modern man has two maps before him: one the map of sentimental religion, the other the map of dogmatic religion. The first is very simple. It has been constructed only in the last few years by a topographer who has just gone into the business of map making and is extremely adverse to explicit directions. He believes that each man should find his own way and not have his liberty taken away by dogmatic directions. The other map is much more complicated and full of dogmatic detail. It has been made by topographers who have been over every inch of the road for centuries and know each detour and each pitfall. It has explicit directions and dogmas such as, 'Do not take this road - it is swampy,' or 'Follow this road; although rough and rocky at first, it leads to a smooth road on a mountaintop.'

The simple map is very easy to read, but those who are guided by it are generally lost in a swamp of mushy sentimentalism. The other map takes a little more scrutiny, but it is simpler in the end, for it takes you up through the rocky road of the world's scorn to the everlasting hills where is seated the original Map Maker, the only One who ever has associated rest with learning: 'Learn of Me...and you shall find rest for your souls.'

Every new coherent doctrine and dogma add to the pabulum for thought; it is an extra bit of garden upon which we can intellectually browse; it is new food into which we can put our teeth and thence absorb nourishment; it is the discovery of a new intellectual planet that adds fullness and spaciousness to our mental world. And simply because it is solid and weighty, because it is dogmatic and not gaseous and foggy like a sentiment, it is intellectually invigorating, for it is with weights that the best drill is done, and not with feathers.

It is the very nature of a man to generate children of his brain in the shape of thoughts, and as he piles up thought on thought, truth on truth, doctrine on doctrine, conviction on conviction, and dogma on dogma, a very coherent and orderly fashion, so as to produce a system complex as a body and yet one and harmonious, the more and more human he becomes. When, however, in response to false cries for progress, he lops off dogmas, breaks with the memory of his forefathers, denies intellectual parentage, pleads for a religion without dogmas, substitutes mistiness for mystery, mistakes sentiment for sediment, he is sinking back slowly, surely, and inevitably into the senselessness of stones and into the irresponsible unconsciousness of weeds. Grass is broad-minded. Cabbages have heads - but no dogmas."

A religion with thought or a religion without it.  Which do you think Francis advances?

Related reading here.

Pope Francis: Doctrine is cold and leads to an abstract world without faith, hope and love

The assault on doctrine continues as Rome disintegrates.

Vatican Radio:

"It is not 'cold doctrine' that brings joy, but faith, and the hope of meeting Jesus. He who cannot rejoice is an unhappy believer: that’s what Pope Francis said in his homily at Thursday morning’s Mass in Santa Marta in the Vatican:
Abraham’s joy upon hearing that as God promised, he may become a father inspired Pope Francis’ reflection Thursday.  Commenting on the day’s readings, Pope Francis remarked that Abraham is old, as well as his wife Sara, but he believes and opens 'his heart to hope' and is 'full of consolation.' Jesus reminds the doctors of the law that Abraham 'rejoiced' to see his day 'and was full of joy':

"And that's what these doctors of the law did not understand. They did not understand the joy of promise; they did not understand the joy of hope; they did not understand the joy of the alliance. They did not understand! They did not know how to rejoice, because they had lost the sense of joy that only comes from faith. Our father Abraham was able to rejoice because he had faith; he was justified in the faith. These others had lost faith. They were doctors of the law, but without faith! But what’s more: they had lost the law! Because the center of the law is love, love for God and neighbor. "

The Pope then continued:

"It’s only that they had a system of precise doctrines and that they clarified each and every day that no one touch them. Men without faith, without law, attached to doctrines that also become an attitude of casuistry: you can pay the tax to Caesar, can you not? This woman, who has been married seven times: when she goes to Heaven will she be the bride of those seven men? This casuistry… This was their world, an abstract world, a world without love, a world without faith, a world without hope, a world without trust, a world without God. And for this, they could not rejoice!"

Perhaps, the doctors of the law - the Pope observes ironically - could also have fun, "but without joy," indeed "with fear." "This is life without faith in God, without trust in God, without hope in God." And "their heart was petrified." It's sad, the Pope stressed, to be a believer without joy - and  joy is not there when there is no faith, when there is no hope, when there is no law - but only the regulations, cold doctrine":
"The joy of faith, the joy of the Gospel is the touchstone of the faith of a person. Without joy that person is not a true believer. Let's go home, but before that, we celebrate here with these words of Jesus: 'Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad.' And ask the Lord for the grace to be rejoicing in hope, for the grace to see the day of Jesus when we will be with Him and for the grace of joy."

So, according to Pope Francis, the believer is hindered by dogma.  Dogma is portrayed by the Pontiff as a danger to faith, as something which leads to coldness and the death of faith, hope and love-  the Theological Virtues.

Where is Francis going with this? Is there really any doubt? Where does a religion without dogma lead? Archbishop Fulton John Sheen, in an Essay which may be found in his book The Electronic Christian, tells us:


"The modern man must decide for himself whether he is going to have a religion with thought or a religion without it. He already knows that thoughtless policies lead to the ruin of society, and he may begin to suspect that thoughtless religion ends in confusion worse confounded. 

The problem is simple. The modern man has two maps before him: one the map of sentimental religion, the other the map of dogmatic religion. The first is very simple. It has been constructed only in the last few years by a topographer who has just gone into the business of map making and is extremely adverse to explicit directions. He believes that each man should find his own way and not have his liberty taken away by dogmatic directions. The other map is much more complicated and full of dogmatic detail. It has been made by topographers who have been over every inch of the road for centuries and know each detour and each pitfall. It has explicit directions and dogmas such as, 'Do not take this road - it is swampy,' or 'Follow this road; although rough and rocky at first, it leads to a smooth road on a mountaintop.'

The simple map is very easy to read, but those who are guided by it are generally lost in a swamp of mushy sentimentalism. The other map takes a little more scrutiny, but it is simpler in the end, for it takes you up through the rocky road of the world's scorn to the everlasting hills where is seated the original Map Maker, the only One who ever has associated rest with learning: 'Learn of Me...and you shall find rest for your souls.'

Every new coherent doctrine and dogma add to the pabulum for thought; it is an extra bit of garden upon which we can intellectually browse; it is new food into which we can put our teeth and thence absorb nourishment; it is the discovery of a new intellectual planet that adds fullness and spaciousness to our mental world. And simply because it is solid and weighty, because it is dogmatic and not gaseous and foggy like a sentiment, it is intellectually invigorating, for it is with weights that the best drill is done, and not with feathers.

It is the very nature of a man to generate children of his brain in the shape of thoughts, and as he piles up thought on thought, truth on truth, doctrine on doctrine, conviction on conviction, and dogma on dogma, a very coherent and orderly fashion, so as to produce a system complex as a body and yet one and harmonious, the more and more human he becomes. When, however, in response to false cries for progress, he lops off dogmas, breaks with the memory of his forefathers, denies intellectual parentage, pleads for a religion without dogmas, substitutes mistiness for mystery, mistakes sentiment for sediment, he is sinking back slowly, surely, and inevitably into the senselessness of stones and into the irresponsible unconsciousness of weeds. Grass is broad-minded. Cabbages have heads - but no dogmas. (pp. 74-74).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that, "The Church's Magisterium exercises the authority it holds from Christ to the fullest extent when it defines dogmas, that is, when it proposes, in a form obliging the Christian people to an irrevocable adherence of faith, truths contained in divine Revelation or also when it proposes, in a definitive way, truths having a necessary connection with these." (CCC, 88).

How critical is dogma to one's faith life?  Again the Catechism explains, "There is an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas.  Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure.  Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith." (CCC, 89).

Pope Francis would have us believe that dogma leads us away from compassion and to a cold Pharisaism. But as far as compassion is concerned, we must define our terms.

Because of human frailty, every sinner deserves both pity and compassion. However, vice and sin must be excluded from this compassion. This because sin can never be the proper object of compassion. (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 30, a.1, ad 1).

It is a false compassion which supplies the sinner with the means to remain attached to sin. Such "compassion" provides an assistance (whether material or moral) which actually enables the sinner to remain firmly attached to his evil ways. By contrast, true compassion leads the sinner away from vice and back to virtue. As Thomas Aquinas explains:

"We love sinners out of charity, not so as to will what they will, or to rejoice in what gives them joy, but so as to make them will what we will, and rejoice in what rejoices us. Hence it is written: 'They shall be turned to thee, and thou shalt not be turned to them.'" (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 25, a.6, ad 4, citing Jeremiah 15:19).

St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that the sentiment of compassion only becomes a virtue when it is guided by reason, since "it is essential to human virtue that the movements of the soul should be regulated by reason." (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 30, c.3). Without such regulation, compassion is merely a passion. A false compassion is a compassion not regulated and tempered by reason and is, therefore, a potentially dangerous inclination. This because it is subject to favoring not only that which is good but also that which is evil (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 30, a.1, ad 3).

An authentic compassion always stems from charity. True compassion is an effect of charity (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 30, a.3, ad 3). But it must be remembered that the object of this virtue is God, whose love extends to His creatures. (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 25, a.3). Therefore, the virtue of compassion seeks to bring God to the one who suffers so that he may thereby participate in the infinite love of God. As St. Augustine explains:

"'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' Now, you love yourself suitably when you love God better than yourself. What, then, you aim at in yourself you must aim at in your neighbor, namely, that he may love God with a perfect affection." (St. Augustine, Of the Morals of the Catholic Church, No. 49).

Related reading here.

"Satan has also entered into the interior of the Church and has succeeded in darkening her splendor..."

Our Lady has spoken to Father Gobbi many times about the satanic pride which is crippling humanity and so dangerously threatening it. On December 8, 1993, she told Father Gobbi, "Satan has deceived this entire poor humanity, bringing it so far away from God and building for it idols of his own perversion: money, pride, egoism, amusement and impurity. And so humanity is today greatly threatened by violence, hatred, rebellion and war. During these years, you will see the great chastisement, with which the justice of God will purify this world, which has become a thousand times worse than at the time of the flood and so very possessed by evil spirits.....Satan has also entered into the interior of the Church and has succeeded in darkening her splendor. With the darkness of sin, he has obscured the splendor of her holiness; with the wound of division, he has made an attack upon the strength of her unity; with the spread of errors, he has stricken her in her proclamation of the truth.."

On May 13, 1993, Our Lady told Father Gobbi, "The powers which are directing and arranging human events, according to their perverse plans, are the dark and diabolic powers of evil. They have succeeded in in bringing all humanity to live without God. They have spread everywhere the error of theoretical and practical atheism. They have built the new idols before which humanity is bowing down in adoration: pleasure, money, pride, impurity, mastery over others, and impiety. Thus, in these years of yours, violence is spreading more and more. Egoism has made the hearts of men hard and insensitive. Hatred has blazed up like a scorching fire. Wars have multiplied in every part of the world, and you are now living in the danger of a terrible world war which will bring destruction to peoples and nations, a war from which no one will emerge victorious. Satan has succeeded in entering into the Church, the new Israel of God. He has entered there with the smoke of error and sin, the loss of faith and apostasy, of compromise with the world and the search for pleasure. During these years, he has succeeded in leading astray bishops, priests, religious and faithful.."

Today we are living in the most decadent, violent and faithless period in the history of mankind. But many cannot see this because they have succumbed to satanic pride. Satan fell in love with his own beauty and wound up rebelling against God and leading other angels to do the same, drawing them to Hell. Today, bishops, priests, religious and laity, puffed up with satanic pride, have become enamored with themselves and their "intellectual prowess." And like their master, the father of all lies (John 8: 44), these too are now rebelling against God and His Holy Church. These sons of Hell spend much of their waking hours contradicting Sacred Scripture, denying dogma and popularizing immorality. These pseudo-intellectuals arrogantly divinize man's intellect while ridiculing the Word of God. Saint Paul spoke of these disciples of Lucifer in 2 Timothy 4: 1-4: "I charge you to preach the word, to stay with this task whether convenient or inconvenient - correcting, reproving, appealing - constantly teaching and never losing patience. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but, following their own desires, will surround themselves with teachers who tickle their ears. They will stop listening to the truth and will wander off to fables."

In Romans 1, Saint Paul emphasizes the fact that there is a connection between a refusal to acknowledge and obey God and a subsequent degeneration of morality. And yet, with all the sex abuse scandals within the Church and all the sexual immorality and dissent, there has been very little discussion about this truth. False worship and pride in one's own intellect cause spiritual blindness and subject men to the destructive and degrading drives of fallen nature - most especially in the area of sex. Saint Paul tells us that people who fall into such spiritual blindness begin to encourage others to do so. And so infidelity spreads like a cancer.

If we are to remain steadfast in the faith, we must continue to rely only on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of His Mother. As Father Lorenzo Scupoli reminds us, "Distrust of yourself is so necessary in the spiritual combat that, without it, you may be assured that you will neither gain the desired victory, nor be able to overcome even the weakest of your passions. You must be firmly convinced in your mind that this is the case, for, through our natural conception, we are too prone to make a false estimate of ourselves. Although we are absolutely nothing, we persuade ourselves that we are something and presume without the slightest foundation on our own strength." (Spiritual Combat, p. 11, Sophia Institute Press).

Jesus has said it: "Without Me, you can do nothing." Do we really believe this? Do we remind ourselves every day that without Him we can do nothing, that we are nothing? We are like a puff of smoke, a blade of grass - here today and gone tomorrow. Do we, insignificant creatures that we are, dare to question or challenge Almighty God? Do we dare to contradict the Son of Man and His Church? If so, then we are either unbelievers or demoniacs.

And His Word is not in us.


An excellent prayer to pray daily: Here.