Francis Abolishing Family Norms?
At #Synod2018 Presser; Cardinal Juan José Omella says “As old folks we should not be afraid to embark on this new path the Pope is pointing out to us. It is a path that is leading us to new kinds of families, new family relations, and we should not be afraid to open up to this” pic.twitter.com/t3g0uc0nrb
— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) October 13, 2018
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I would like to hear the context in which the cardinal archbishop of Barcelona made this comment. Perhaps it is less worrying than it seems here — but I doubt it.
Did you ever think you would see the Catholic Church deconstruct and abandon its own fundamental moral tradition on marriage and family as Francis and his team are now doing? It’s happening so fast. Remember what top Francis advisor Father Thomas Rosica wrote recently:
Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.
Let the reader understand.
UPDATE: News from the Synod working group headed by Cardinal Cupich of Chicago:
Also, there are many other forms of family other than the nuclear family or the extended family. We had a debate in our small group about non-ideal groupings from the Christian perspective. Does leadership in the Church require bishops and priests to proclaim the Gospel truth by denying that these are families? Or does our leadership require us to accompany the young people in the reality in which they find themselves? Perhaps these are not contradictory realities: St John recounts that Jesus both accepted the woman caught in adultery and proposed something else. Is it possible for us to both accept and even honour the family unit that a young person finds herself in and to share the Gospel ideal to her?
And, Catholic theologian Larry Chapp, in the comments:
I highly doubt that Pope Francis will just flat-out repudiate the Catholic doctrine that marriage is a life long sacramental union of one man and one women for the purpose of mutual support and procreation. For starters…. he can’t. Those are clearly infallible teachings of the Church and if he were to just repudiate them, there would be a schism, without a doubt, and open rebellion to his legitimacy as Pope. Now, maybe that is his end game, but even if it is, the time is not yet ripe for such a move.
Rather, look to the methodology followed in Amoris. Do not openly deny any doctrine, just undermine it in actual pastoral practice by calling for more “discernment” and paying attention to “concrete experiences” and so on.
That is how the Pope will get acceptance of “gay” families in the Church. He will call for pastors to “accompany” such individuals in order to “discern” if they are doing the very best they can to live up to the Church’s “ideals”. And if they are doing their best, to let them take communion, since living the commandments, as Cardinal Kasper said with regard to those divorced and remarried, is only for the “heroic”.
The same approach could also be applied to contraception and co-habitation. The doctrine will be affirmed as an “ideal”, with different individuals falling into a spectrum on how close they are to the ideal. And so long as they are at peace in their own conscience, no matter how poorly formed, then they can go to communion. This will be done under the banner of “pastoral” sensitivity and an opposition to “rigid” rules. The appeal will be to an “inclusive” Catholicism that has a “big tent” that allows for almost everyone to go to communion under the guise of a kind of “gradualism” in moral matters. This view was condemned explicitly by JPII. But heck… that was a long time ago and who remembers that stuff?
The goal is obviously to someday eliminate the doctrine of infallibility completely, and to create practices in the Church that make such behaviors and lifestyles commonplace, so that when the doctrines are eventually changed, nobody will even notice or care. Since the Church does have a Magisterium, in order for the Roman Church to go full-on Episcopalian, you have to first destroy that Magisterium. But that has to be done in steps. And it begins by “allowing” behaviors that the Church has heretofore infallibly said no to. Over time, it will just become obvious to everyone that nobody really believes any of that silly medieval nonsense anymore and the transformation into liberal Episcopalians will be complete.
But why bother with such a ruse? Why not just have Francis publicly repudiate the doctrine of infallibility, change some central moral teachings, and foment a schism letting the chips fall where they may? Why not let the damn homophobic conservatives run off to Orthodoxy or to the schismatic traditionalists? The answer is simple, though shocking. So shocking many will refuse to accept it. Why don’t they just make their move and let the conservatives bolt out the door? Because this gaggle of progressives is demonic. And I mean that in a very real way and not as just a hyperbolic metaphor. What they seek is nothing short of the total annihilation and humiliation of the conservatives by way of a total reversal of values: the good becomes evil and the evil good. They want conservatives discredited as “fringe group” wing nuts so that they cannot even mount a populist revolt from the outside. They want to rob them of any constituency and of any legitimacy. They want them labeled as “bad people”. They want, as the Pope has recently done, to cast their conservative enemies as Satan, and themselves as Jesus. They want the opposition liquidated so that there isn’t even the appearance any longer of a “debate”. They want opposition to gay families and abortion and sexual libertinism to be viewed right up there with opposition to racial equality, thus painting the defenders of traditional morality, not just as “wrong”, but as stupid at best, and evil at worst.
Finally, it is demonic because the end game is a de facto secularist atheism. Naturalism with a religious halo. Worldliness dressed up as “inclusive diversity”. The average person in the pew is unaware that for the better part of the past two centuries the Christian theological guild has, for the most part, reinterpreted Jesus in completely non supernatural categories. This is especially true among scholars of the New Testament. Jesus has been transformed. No longer the second person of the Trinity, Incarnate for our salvation, but rather, now just a protagonist of class warfare on the side of the “marginalized” and in opposition to “power”. And if you are a traditional Christian you are thus categorized as part of that “power” that oppresses.
So faith in Jesus as the Incarnate God comes to be viewed as a form of patriarchal, white male, cisnormative oppression. The faith of our ancestors and of the martyrs, was merely a cipher for hegemonic power and control.
Wake up. I know most people are not theologians and are not knoweldgeable of intellectual and cultural history, but we no longer have the luxury of such ignorance. And part of any Ben Op community must be an education precisely into the richest resources of our Tradition and of the manner in which hyper-modernity (liquid modernity) is destroying them. The situation of any true Ben Op community is not enviable. For we must now labor to preserve our past, not in the face of pagan barbarity, but in a swirling cesspool of post-Christian hatred (a visceral and irrational hatred I might add) and the aforementioned reversal of values. In other words, a true Ben Op community is going to be hated. Vilified. Attacked. Hounded into submission. Just look at the Youth Synod’s little dig at home schoolers for being “ideological”. And our public schools aren’t? Of course they are. But they have a “good” ideology. Homeschoolers have an evil one.
We had better get ready for what is rapidly approaching. Already, in the few short years since Rod published the Ben Op, we have seen things grow exponentially worse. And the brief respite purchased for us by the wretched clown that is Donald Trump, will not last long. Indeed, in my view, it will only create a far worse backlash once he is gone because we will be blamed for him being in power in the first place. We will be the scapegoat.
And because the secular worldview, especially in its emphasis on an empty Epicurean hedonism, is so nihilistic, only unhappiness will follow in its wake. It advocates an impossible marriage with matter, that cannot satisfy, it will create resentment and hostility in an undifferentiated manner … just a general dissipation and acedia of the soul that leads to despair. And that will only make their rage at traditional religious people all the more incendiary.
I wish that these comments at the Youth Synod on marriage were just a mild stupidity by a nobody prelate that we can just dismiss. But we can’t. This IS what these quislings think.
We face a more radical decision in the near future than we think.