Pope Leo has indicated that Catholics and all people need to be able to develop intellectual skills to think critically and to be able to critique ideologies that are promoted as truth. Often, these ideologists, taking advantage of those who cannot or will not think critically, do so to manipulate those who eagerly accept anything that a person is saying. This is how cult leaders think. Just think of Jim Jones and his cult followers who drank the kool Aide with him and all of them died.
This can happen with papal utterances, either real or reported, when anyone instrumentalizes an uncritical approach to papal infallibility and turns the pope into a cult leader.
There is a creeping papal infallibility promoted by ideologists for things that the pope simply may not declare to be infallibly taught. He has absolutely no authority to do so.
A Holy Father suffering from dementia, delusions, narcissism or just being dumb, can declare infallibly by way of the manner in which he does it, that Jesus was an astronaut from a superior galaxy’s planet. However, while he can do it, he may not. And no one in their right mind, capable of critical thinking would accept it as infallible.
The only problem, though, is that there does not seem to be a mechanism in the Church to correct or rebuke a pope and the bishops in union with him, when they teach as truth something untrue or a teaching with absolutely no basis of belief in the early Church through the present day.
I don’t know how that can be corrected. But critical thinking certainly can.
Saint Pope John Paul II has given the Church a way to institutionalize a papal or ecumenical council’s false teaching on something with no basis of tradition declared as infallible. When it came to women receiving the Sacrament of Holy Orders, Saint John Paul II stated emphatically that he had absolutely no authority to authorize doctrinally or dogmatically that women could be ordained as only men could be admitted to Holy Orders is a part of the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church. Pope John Paul II had critical thinking skills and made it public!
And this brings me to one of the contributors of the blog “Where Peter Is” who stated in the most absurd and uncritical thinking way the following, with Edward Feser offering him a wonderful correction. Mike Lewis needs to listen to the sage advice of Pope Leo about the need for critical thinking abilities. We need an institutional correction method too, if a pope ever did what Mike Lewis is quite willing to accept simply because the pope did it:
11 comments:
My opinion, not one of my particular Church, this is the problem with the papacy.
New doctrines, creating semantic debates, FS, it's authority unchecked just like Francis ignored the fraternal Dubia.
I, and my confreres, shiver at the notion of innovation for innovations sake, the pursuit of pseudo relevance or a recent episode of Pope Gone Wild.
And yes, Im also afraid the popesplainers would jump off a bridge if instructed by a pope to do so or they'd actually venerate a head of lettuce if instructed "infallibly" by a pope to do so for the Transfiguration Feast.
Worry not.
Thanks to the promise of Jesus Christ, Rome has preserved the Catholic Religion immaculate. Therefore, as Holy Mother Church has guaranteed, our communion with the Bishop of Rome will ensure that we hold the True Faith.
Pax.
Mark Thomas
LOL
Well said! We need a canonical process to remove a pope for promulgating heresy
It is via Divine guidance that our Popes exercise their teaching authority over us. An example of one such Pope:
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Bishop Barron:
"...Pope Francis held the line, demonstrating thereby the mysterious guidance of the Holy Spirit over the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church."
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Bishop Barron continued:
"What I find perhaps most intriguing about Pope Francis is what he didn’t do...many on the Catholic left commenced to see him as the long-awaited liberal savior, the one who would revive the postconciliar dream that had been punctured by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
"Francis, they were convinced, would, at long last, bring us married priests, women priests, and gay marriage, a liberalizing of the Church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and birth control.
"Well, he delivered on precisely none of it. The great Catholic surrender to the demands of the culture didn’t happen on his watch, and it was amusing in the extreme to watch the mainstream liberal Catholic media try to come to terms with this.
"In fact, abortion had no stronger opponent than Francis, who frequently compared it to the “hiring of a hitman.”
"And he was a strenuous critic of what he often called “gender ideology,” the imposition of which on developing nations he termed “ideological colonization.”
"...Pope Francis held the line, demonstrating thereby the mysterious guidance of the Holy Spirit over the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church."
Pax.
Mark Thomas
How the Holy Spirit protects the Church from a corrupted pope or corrupted teachings coming from him is that all of our teachings are in the open, nothing hidden in the Deposit of Faith. So if a pope teaches Jesus was an alien from outer space or women may be ordained, the Holy Spirit protects the Church from this corruption simply by directing our earths and minds to critique th pope based upon the Deposit of Faith and morals.
Hearts not earths.
One thing the Holy Spirit did during the pontificate of Pope Francis was to keep the Emeritus Pope, Pope Benedict XVI alive for most of that papacy. If Pope Benedict XVI had died instead of resigned on the date he did, I think Pope Francis would have moved forward very quickly with some of his heterodox moral teachings as it concerns LGBTQ+ ideologies and actually blessing unions rather than individuals. FS is a virus that isn’t heretical yet, but can lead to heresy one day. It was and is meant to soften the ground for LGBTQ+ ideologies in full to include “marriages.”
I am thankful that God had granted holy Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI (requiescat in pace) many happy and blessed years. Nevertheless, it was God directly who had, if you will, kept Pope Francis (requiescat in pace) "in line."
It is God who had kept Pope Benedict XVI "in line."
God used people to inspire Pope Francis, Pope Benedict XVI, etc. But Jorge Bergoglio, upon becoming Pope, had been blessed from God directly with never-failing faith...with Divine protection that had enabled him (Pope Francis) to have taught, governed, and sanctified us in union with the True Faith.
The bottom line is that as Bishop Barron had declared in accord with Church teaching, "Pope Francis held the line, demonstrating thereby the mysterious guidance of the Holy Spirit over the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church."
Today, holy Pope Leo XIV, under Divine protection, will teach, govern, and sanctify us in orthodox fashion. It is guaranteed that Pope Leo XIV's Magisterium will not fail.
Pax.
Mark Thomas
Mike Lewis, and some other papal maximalists whose names begin with M, have a view of the papacy closer to the Mormon view of their prophets. I keep using the word, but if the boot fits: bizarre.
Nick
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