Francis’ Activity so Far in 2017: “dumpster fire smoke”

Francis’ Activity so Far in 2017: “dumpster fire smoke”

Of course Francis is not really the pope, even though most people assume that he is. His authority is only that of a cardinal from Argentina.

January 23, 2017 (TheStream) — Pope Francis warned us that he wanted to “make a mess” in the church, and at the moment, he seems to be making good on that promise. In still-fresh 2017, we have seen:

• The pope’s close advisor, Rev. Antonio Spadaro, who edits the quasi-official Vatican journal La Civilta Cattolica, defend Pope Francis’s apparent defiance of the infallible Council of Trent on divorce and remarriage, by explaining that in theology, “2+2=5.”  No one knows quite what that means, but perhaps that’s the point.
• The bishops of Malta have published a set of guidelines for Holy Communion based on Pope Francis’s ambiguous document Amoris Laetitia, which openly depart from Catholic teaching and practice of 2,000 years. The Vatican’s response? To publish those guidelines, without criticism, in the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano.
• The Vatican’s science congregation, led by Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, has summoned a conference on biodiversity, and invited as a speaker Paul Ehrlich — a discredited “overpopulation” crank who favors coercive population control and abortion.
• As Professor Michael Pakaluk of the Catholic University of America revealed, papal ghostwriter, Argentine Archbishop Victor Fernandez, committed plagiarism in the text of Amoris Laetitia — lifting paragraphs almost whole from Fernandez’s own, wacky theological speculations. Some of the most troubling parts of that document which the pope made his own are snipped and tucked from an article where Fernandez asserts that absolutely every human being is saved. At least Fernandez didn’t (so far as we know) include any passages from his 1995 book: Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing.

And we still have 50 more weeks to go!
In light of all this dumpster fire smoke, it seems useful to examine the very narrow limits within which papal authority is circumscribed by the Church’s perennial teaching. Otherwise, well-meaning people might very well get the idea that the Catholic Church is morphing before our eyes into a mainline Protestant denomination. Plus bingo. …

Read the full article at Life Site News