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Saturday, October 30, 2021

DID POPE FRANCIS ACTUALLY SAY TO PRESIDENT BIDEN “YOU ARE A GOOD CATHOLIC, CONTINUE RECEIVING HOLY COMMUNION”


Did the pope exactly say that to President Biden, “you are a good Catholic and keep receiving Holy Communion”, or did he say…”if you are a good Catholic, keep receiving Holy Communion?” Who knows and we may never know.

For political and vengeance reasons (for Catholic votes and to get even with bishops questioning his catholicity) President Biden told the world in a sound byte that the pope told him he is a good Catholic and to continue to receive Holy Communion.

Because this sound byte can be used for manipulative reasons and to polarize and divide Catholics and their bishops in the USA, the Vatican should set the record straight and tell us the context of this statement and if it is accurate or was there that all important word “if?”

The Holy Father needs to keep his bishops in communion with him and should not punish them by backhanded or passive aggressive, snarky means. 

To me it appears that if the pope actually said this to President Biden, knowing the divisions among the Bishops of the USA then it is an act of passive aggression towards bishops in communion with him and an untoward and immature way to deal with those bishops that make him mad.  

And it plays out in the major medias as well as social media like this one. 

This pope does seem to me to be passive aggressive and sometimes quite active aggressive, but only towards those he perceives as annoying him like the dubia cardinals but the same toward Archbishop Viganò who in my mind should have been and should be called into the papal office for a listening and talking to session because what Vigano is doing is unacceptable as is some of what this pope is doing if in fact he is doing it. 

As much as this pope talks about listening and dialogue, he is notorious about not doing it and only with one group of people, the ones he considers legalistic, rigid and orthodox. 

If Pope Francis thinks Catholics in manifest unrepentant sinfulness should receive Holy Communion as a “magic Cookie” to cure all their ailments and make them feel good despite their sins and crimes, then the pope should issue a formal statement confirming this teaching and in his name. 

But if what the pope said to President Biden is true, there’s that pesky “if” again, then this is just one more thing this pope has done to polarize Catholics, bishops, priests, deacons, men and women religious and the laity or is it the laity, women and men religious, deacons, priests, and bishops or should I have started with non-believers? 

32 comments:

monkmcg said...

It would not be out of character at all for the Bishop of Rome to say it. The magisterium of the Francis and the Deposit of Faith are increasingly going separate ways.

Fr. Michael J. Kavanaugh said...

For, it seems, "political and vengeance reasons" you suggest that the pope believes that the Eucharist is a "magic cookie" to make people feel good about their sins. You do this in a passive-aggressive and "untoward and immature way" in an attempt to divide Catholics in American from their bishops and, maybe, from the Bishop of Rome.

How is this different from the motivations you say Biden has?

TJM said...

Since Biden has a long history of lying, I would not count on it.

Fr. Allan J. McDonald said...

Good question and like the pope and the Vatican, you will here crickets from me. So we’ll await your answer.

Fr. Michael J. Kavanaugh said...

What will I here I wonder....?

Jerome Merwick said...

"magic cookie"?

"Passive-aggressive/untoward and immature way" to "divide Catholics?


I suppose we should be grateful for such a blatant revealing of such modernist pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook.

Jerome Merwick said...

The ONLY time I've ever heard the Eucharist referred to as a "magic cookie" has been when Catholic-hating Protestants are talking about the sacrament. This is disgustingly offensive to see two priests employing such cheap, jingoistic jargon.

Fr. Allan J. McDonald said...

Jerome, the implications that one can receive the Sacraments of the Church despite their manifest and unrepentant sinfulness turns the sacraments, all of them, into a “magic cookie’ or like carrying a rabbit’s foot. It is a paganization of our sacraments. Many people steal the Sacred Hosts in the past and today for superstitious reasons, good luck, to bury in fields to bring about good crops, etc. Thus they are using the most Sacred Sign/Sacrament of the Church in a magical way as a sort of “Magic Cookie”. That descriptive is not used by me to say that our Sacrament are that, but in fact to think they are is a sacrilege.

Fr. Allan J. McDonald said...

By the way, in my 1970’s seminary, where adoration and Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament was not allowed until there was a protest by some seminarians in my first year theology class in 1976 that brought Benediction to us once a year and I can recall it only twice while I was there, a liturgical professor-priest with a doctorate in Catholic Spirituality and Liturgy stated that Benediction was “Canninite Cookie Worship.” He did not use that term in a pejorative way but actually believed that Catholics who adore Christ in the Blessed Sacrament were pagans worshiping a false idol!

rcg said...

Jerome is right, it is offensive, but seems to be used as an accusation. To be more clear, and I hope Christ-like, the point is that the abuse of the Church by Catholic politicians is another lash on the body of Christ. The Pope should be warning the politicians of the harm they do themselves and others by their actions and words. If he does not have the nerve to therapeutically ex-communicate them, he could remind them to recite the prayer that has survived The Great Revision, “Let not the partaking of Thy Body, Lord Jesus Christ, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my judgment and condemnation; but through Thy Goodness, let it become a safeguard and an effective remedy,…” before they bite down on the Body of Christ.

TJM said...

Jerome Merwick,

If you have not figured this out already, Father K is a democratic party operative masquerading as a Catholic priest. He knowingly votes for the Party of Intrinsic evil and seems quote proud of it. He obviously has forgotten this:

"So anyone who eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord unworthily is guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord."

This applies to everyone, politician or priests. PF says abortion is murder, so I guess he is saying, "come to Holy Communion" even if you commit murder." Biden is an inveterate liar, so I am skeptical that the Pope actually said this.

Jerome Merwick said...

To me, the key word in this story is "if". We don't know and probably never will know WHAT the Bergoglio and Walking Corpse talked about in that room. And, like every official who has ever been elected to office, Biden doesn't have great relationship with the truth. Making it worse, he has an even shakier relationship with reality.


I know God created me to live in this time of history, but I often wish I had been born about 100 years ago. WWII and the Great Depression, awful as they were, might have been easier to navigate than this current age of horrid stupidity. At least in those days, you clearly knew who your enemies were, the bishops at least APPEARED to be on the same page, the popes spoke the truth consistently and there was no question about what was expected of Catholics. I despise this age of perversion and unreality. I am sick of what has happened to our Church. I cannot think of one time in my life--not one time--when our Church was clearly doing what it was supposed to do. It's been nothing but falling apart, weakness, effeminate faggotry and heterodoxy as long as I can remember. I will say this--until Francis, our popes at least gave the APPEARANCE of orthodoxy. Looks like Martini finally got HIS vision of the Church.

Yech.

Fr. Allan J. McDonald said...

Jerome! You just did to the Holy Father but in a real way because you believe it, what you were complaining about when I and Fr. MJK used “Magic Cookie” in a pejorative way as we don’t believe that Holy Communion is that: “ We don't know and probably never will know WHAT the Bergoglio and Walking Corpse.”
There are canon laws against insulting the reigning pope in this way, btw and is serious matter for deciding if the sin committed is a mortal sin or a venial sin.

tough jelly said...

Canon law 915 says those who “…obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion”
Telling everyone to receive gives the impression that it is a magic cookie and not the actual living body of Christ. This won’t help people get to heaven

Jerome Merwick said...

I respect the office of pope and I will, upon my first opportunity confess this sin and leave it to the priest to decide the degree of it--but I have to say this: I have reservations about the degree of this as a sin. All I called the pope was "the Bergoglio". Is that an insult? It might be a play on words with his name, but I had no malicious intent, perhaps just a slight sense of tongue-in-cheek mischievousness. This is further complicated by the two clear problems:

1). From the beginning there has been a serious question about whether he is a legitimately and canonically-elected pope. The Sankt-Gallen Mafia is NOT imaginary and they have made no attempt to hide what they did.

2). This pope has straddled and winked at heresy and heterodoxy all down the line and has carefully played his statements and the attribution of such statements in such a way as to always have plausible deniability. He is very clever.

What is a Catholic to think?

Jerome Merwick said...

And just to be clear, "The Walking Corpse" was a reference to Joe Biden, not the pope.

William said...

Pope Francis disappoints and disappoints deeply. This has all been so demoralizing.

ByzRus said...

What was said between the HF and the President should have stayed between the two of them. The President choose to make a statement that is now the cause of confusion. We know what our beliefs are, we know what is right and regardless of what was discussed during their meeting and the extent to which the President's comment accurately summarizes that discussion, we should carry on as we always have. We're not going to prove anything to the contrary.

Jerome Merwick said...

Father McDonald,

If you believe my comments are mortally sinful I ask you to delete them. If you believe they are scandalous or tempting others to mortal sin, again, I ask you to remove them.

However, I do not think it is mortally sinful to observe that this pope has conflated disagreement with him as "attacking the Church". That is very problematic.

TJM said...

ByzRus,

Biden is an inveterate liar. You should read Bill Donahue of the Catholic League's comments on this imbroglio. Since the mainstream media no longer does its job when it comes to Democrat politicians, you might be very surprised what you read in Donahue's release. Biden's lies knocked him out of 3 previous presidential primaries when the media still gave a damn about reporting.

TJM said...

Here's the money quote of the day from one commentator on this matter:

"Who knows what Pope Francis really said. But Biden’s comments are of a piece with what Francis/Gregory/Cupich have said previously and so have a greater probability of accuracy. The Pope’s teaching is clear: Abortion is murder; but go ahead and murder to your heart’s content. There will be no consequences. All are welcome. And the number of Catholics who abort will grow. Because we don’t really mean what we teach. On anything. Except the climate."

I have been saying this for years" words without action are meaningless.

TJM said...

This will devastate pro abortion Dems like Biden:

"Abortions dropped by about 50 percent in Texas in September after a new law prohibiting most abortions went into effect, according to a new study.

The drop was ascertained by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. The group compared the number of abortions performed at Texas clinics this September (2,164) to the amount in September 2020 (4,313).

Researchers were able to gather statistics on abortions performed at 19 of the 24 Texas abortion facilities. Those facilities perform approximately 93 percent of all abortions in the state.

The law, which went into effect on Sept. 1, bars physicians from performing an abortion without first testing for a fetal heartbeat. If the heartbeat is detected, an abortion can only be done if the doctor determines a medical emergency exists.

This has upset liberals.

Dr. Allison Gilbert, a physician and medical director at the Southwestern Women’s Surgery Center in Dallas called the events “devastating.”

See that, it is devastating that you can't kill the unborn.

Jerome Merwick said...

TJM

It is devastating to a physician who depends upon abortions for his income. Now he can no longer fill in the billing code and accept payment. It all about the money.

For doctors, the entire abortion industry is all about the money. For the rest...well, I won't go there.

TJM said...

Jerome Merwick,

It’s also devastating to the Dem Party which fundraises based on protecting the right to kill the unborn, a party some corrupt bishops and priests support

Jerome Merwick said...

Oh stop complaining TJM. Can't you see how much better off our nation is now that we got rid of that horrible liar Trump? Not only has Biden saved the planet by his executive order killing the Keystone Pipeline, but he opened up a path for those poor OPEC countries to make a fair income by charging us higher prices and, effectively, giving every American who drives a wage cut and driving up the price of all transported goods and services! And now he is in Europe discussing with G7 leaders how to make energy prices go up even MORE!
THANKS DEMOCRATIC VOTERS!

But there's more! Under his brilliant economic leadership, we now have inflation rates we haven't seen since the Ford/Carter debacle of the 1970's!
THANKS DEMOCRATIC VOTERS!

And, now that statistics are showing more people infected with COVID who have been vaccinated than among the unvaccinated, Biden's vaccination mandates are driving essential workers from the armed forces, fire departments, hospitals, police forces and generally every other industry.
THANKS DEMOCRATIC VOTERS!

And can't you see the great advancements that black people have made under Biden's superior leadership? I mean, come on, Trump HAD to be a racist because every Democrat SAID that he was...so it MUST be true!

So with our economy in the tank, race relations frayed, cancel culture rampant, energy police at the mercy of foreign powers, thank God we have a president who cares about IMPORTANT issues, like prosecuting anyone who is a Trump supporter and forcing nursery school children to be vaccinated and opening up the borders to the unvaccinated and anything else than can walk across.

YES, THANK YOU DEMOCRATIC VOTERS!

TJM said...

Thank Father K, he is one of them!

Althea Gardner said...

Bottom line: I don’t believe the Pope actually said this. But, if he did, he’s completely wrong. It’s one thing to believe that sin is forgivable but it’s completely different to reinforce behavior that goes against the Church teachings! I would hope that the pope said “Joe, you need to stop the baby killing rhetoric and fly right”. It’s embarrassing and counterproductive to me when non-Catholic friends ask me about the behavior of our current pope. He’s definitely no John Paul II. *sigh*

TJM said...

Jerome Merwick,

Here's a little snippet which shows how detached from reality the modern Dem Party is:

"Although the Democratic Party has long presented itself as the party of the blue-collar, working-class man, this image has been crumbling in recent years.

Former President Donald Trump certainly broke the Matrix in this regard in 2016, reaching out to Rust Belt manufacturers and coal miners that had been largely abandoned by the new progressive movement’s swift attachment to intersectionality and the job-killing Green Agenda.

Yet the last year’s far-reaching COVID tyranny, which is causing deep rifts between Democratic leadership and public sector union workers, has made this disconnect that much more apparent.

Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was confronted with this fraught relationship head-on this week as she was loudly booed at a fundraiser for a plumbers’ union that endorsed her in 2019."

Jerome Merwick said...

I forgot another important point:

Thanks to the increased strength of our armed forces--our armed forces who went political, our armed forces who cancelled all of its conservative leaders, our armed forces who have placed appeasing the LGBQT agenda over military preparedness and strength, our armed forces who are summarily discharging anyone with enough critical thinking capacity to refuse vaccination, our armed forces whose chief-of-staff is an overpaid, prissy, effeminate fat boy whose first duty in any time of crisis seems to be notifying Xi Jingpen--these armed forces are now so weakened that the Chinese are preparing to seize Taiwan and destroy one of the most productive democracies in Asia.
THANK YOU DEMOCRATIC VOTERS!

(AND I'M SURE THE SOON-TO-BE-FORMERLY-FREE PEOPLE OF TAIWAN THANK YOU TOO!)

TJM said...

Jerome Merwick,

Thank your corrupt leftwing bishops and priests who give cover to the Party of Intrinsic Evil!

Mark said...

Without going down all the rabbit holes opened up in the exchange between Jerome Merwick and TJM, there is always a counter-narrative. I’m not saying it is true necessarily, but it is arguably one that may have weighed with the Pope in conversations with Biden, who was probably the only candidate who had a reasonable chance of defeating Trump in 2020. For example,

Headline after 2020 elections—"Trump reelected as president.” And then democracy and the rule of law died in America.

Outandish? Ask Liz Cheney, Fiona Hill, and on and on.

TJM said...

Mark,

LOL - Liz Cheney, really? I guess for you the "enemy of my enemy is my friend." Thanks for the laughs

PS; the US is in shambles at the moment due to the Senile, Grifter in Chief Biden. France withdraws its ambassadors, the US is no longer energy efficient (the working class is feeling
the brunt of that), and Freedom of Speech is dying. Hey and segregation is back on campuses. I guess George Wallace was ahead of his time!