Happy Birthday Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. He is 94 years old today, April 16. His personal secretary/caregiver stated a few days ago that no one thought Pope Benedict would live this long after he resigned/renounced the papacy. Everyone, including Benedict, thought the end was near. That was February of 2013.
Currently, Benedict’s legacy is that His Holiness renounced the papacy. But, clairvoyant as I am, I know that one day His Magisterium and theology will have a resurgence to rebuild the Catholic Church which since his resignation has become a tattered, listing ship, taking on water, and not Holy Water and in some places Catholic bishops are dangerously close to a true schism as well as apostasy.
DEFIANCE: GERMAN CATHOLIC LEADERS SUPPORT PLANNED ‘BLESSING SERVICE’ FOR SAME-SEX COUPLES
Details: Continuing to openly challenge the Vatican, several Catholic leaders in Germany are openly supporting the blessing of same-sex couples,
16 comments:
The German Church which derives its financial support from the state is a state lackey, so of course they support these types of lunacies
Your statement that "since his resignation...." is so true. Our church is in disarray and our Holy Father seems to almost want it this way. I pray you are right, that in the years to come Benedicts clarity and teaching will return and right the ship that is listing heavily to port...
Wasn't Martin Luther used by the state as well--as much a political movement as a religious one, the Reformation.
The organizers of the blessing seem to have taken the typical gamesmanship cue from German church leaders in decentralizing, using words which could mean about anything, and doing this to dodge any positive action by the Vatican, while offering plausible deniability to those higher up, which all says to me that it was orchestrated higher up, complete with using the new corporate slogan "Lust Wins".
Yes, Martin Luther was used by those who wanted to appropriate Church property, as well as used by those who wanted to overthrow the monarchy and fuedal system entire, igniting a war which lasted decades, raged back and forth across Germany and killed millions.
Luther first cheered for the peasants, encouraging them to butcher bishops, priests and royals, then when he saw the chaos, he began cheering for the royals to butcher the peasants and fill their heads with so many bullets as to cause their heads to jump off their shoulders. A very stable guy. We will not go into his writings where he said he wished he could swallow Satan with his anus.
Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us.
The German Church is not so much a slave to the state, but rather an indentured servant to the ultra-liberal culture in which it exists.
The church tax is circa 10% of individual income added the far higher state taxes.
Given that what is preached in the churches is empty inoffensive pablum in vain hopes of keeping people as members and provides no nourishment, and members rightly deciding what they hear is not worth that sort of money, they still are leaving in droves.
The churches are faced with a steepening downward spiral in income, and so pander ever more to the culture in yet another vain attempt to keep people as members, in a vicious cycle leading to total collapse.
They are headed inevitably towards a consolidated, unified, one-church/one-amorphus-religion at this rate, where all which matter to leaders is preserving institutions and employment, the churches there a huge source of very gainful employment for a very large number of German citizens.
They are making corporate decisions on marketing.
My wife is a Protestant. For Catholics to be honest, just and fair it is important to not forget the following about Martin Luther - which was written by the Cambridge historian, G R Elton, in 1962 :
“We must remember that Luther was a deeply religious man, and a trained theologian to boot, and his revolution took place in the realms of religion and theology (a concentration on “abuses” quite misses the real issue and the real revolution). Whatever other effects and tributaries there may have been in the story, that is the point at which to start. Luther did not just quarrel with the Church because he thought it diseased and corrupt: he thought it, or came to think of it as unchristian and devilish. For in his view the popish religion would not “let God be God”.....but attempted to mould God to man’s needs.....The medieval scheme of religion proceeded from man to God, laying the stress on the human relationship to the divine and employing reason to discover God. It’s theology described a universe comprehensible and useful to man. This is not only perfectly compatible with genuine piety but also, in many ways, sensible and consoling; but such a scheme may well be held to miss the essence of Christianity, namely its belief in a strictly non-human God. Luther started from the primacy of God and laid the stress on His relationship to man. He drew the logical conclusion from the Judeo-Christian concept of God’s omnipotence: man cannot influence, persuade, bribe, threaten God, but only surrender to Him. Salvation thus became not the work of a just God, rewarding man’s efforts to avoid sin, or his repentance if the effort proved too great, but of a loving God who bestows His grace without regard to merit or endeavour, in an act of the only pure kind of love - that which has no taint of self-satisfaction in it -.of which God alone is capable...
...the whole of Luther’s complex, and often far from clear, theology ....comes down to seeing God as pure love - irrational love, not repaying a debt or executing justice, but content to give eternal life to all who would open their souls to faith in Him.....”
I gotta disagree with that trained theologian comment past what he received as a monk in what amounted to a place in the sticks.
Luther came from rude and crude peasant stock and was poorly educated by the standards of his time, and he bragged his greatest inspirations came while on the privy tower (the john), as example in how he expressed himself. Not to mention that bizarre Satan comment.
And he DID incite violence in the most graphic detail in writing against both sides in the conflicts which he helped ignite.
Let's not paper over facts in the desperate search for ecumenism.
And I was raised protestant in a church which made Lutherans appear papist wannabees.
Luther was anti-Semitic, emotionally unstable and arrogant in the extreme.
Have you ever read St Thomas More’s written response to Luther’s theology?
I have. The repeated use of profanities around excrement and privies and urinating donkeys etc could not be posted here.
And regarding antisemitism, one has only to consider the antisemitism of a significant number of popes throughout the centuries and the clear antisemitism of at least 1 or 2 of the early Church Fathers to think of : People in glass houses should not throw stones.
I was taught at both a large secular university AND by a priest/lecturer at a Catholic seminary that Luther had a deeper, more profound and more scriptural understanding of the Real Presence in the Eucharist than Aquinas.
Thus, also, it could accurately be said that Luther had both a deeper and truer understanding of the Real Presence than that held by at least 70% of practicing Catholics in the USA today.
From “The Statesman and the Fanatic” by Jasper Ridley, p 132:
“More’s Answer To Luther must of course be judged by the standards of More’s contemporaries, and not by ours. We today discuss sex with complete freedom, but we do not usually talk and write about excrement. In More’s and Luther’s day, excrement was discussed more freely than sex.”
Luther's colloquialisms are not the point. His extreme rantings promoting the most horrid violence against BOTH sides showed he was out of his element, which was shallow indeed, and likewise for his sources of greatest inspiration on a toilet. And exceptionally unstable, in all of that, and utterly bizarre in quite a few utterances such the anal/Satan thing.
As for professors cooing over Luther's sublime understandings, we all know professors can coo over anything as sublime, including quite a few things not fit to post here.
Luther was terrified of God, death, and hell his entire life, and his "theology" arose out of that terror, him incapable of understanding existing theology and him largely making up what he thought might get him into heaven as a sop to his own irrational fears.
He also was incapable of seeing the ramifications of his beliefs, and to where they would lead, but other "Reformers" such as Calvin and his police state were not slow to see how they could be used.
Luther's greatest inspiration was St Paul's letters and the Psalms.
Anonymous K at 4:53 PM,
Then why is your Party so desperate to erase its own history of racism, Jim Crow, and erase the rest of the nation's history by tearing down statues and renaming schools bearing the names of Lincoln and Washington. Why don't you and your Party apply that same sensitivity you do to Luther's antisemitism?
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