If The Pope Won’t Defend The Catholic Church, Who Will?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – This is why what Pope Francis said yesterday or in a series of interviews is so disturbing.  I think there are some good things he said as well, but some of what he said is disturbing.  That’s not just the traditional Catholic in me; that’s the world traditionalist in me.  If the Catholic Church is not going to do it, then who in the hell is?  Who’s left?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  This is why what Pope Francis said yesterday or in a series of interviews is so disturbing.  I think there are some good things he said as well, but some of what he said is disturbing.  That’s not just the traditional Catholic in me; that’s the world traditionalist in me.  If the Catholic Church is not going to do it, then who in the hell is?  Who’s left?  What I’m talking about is this interview here.  Rod Dreher, God bless you, Rod.  I searched for about 15 minutes this morning for a good post on this.  I found many, but Rod’s take on this was the best I’d seen in reviewing what the pope had said.  There are some good things here, just as there are some things that are very troubling.  As Dreher points out, and I pointed this out to you, the American and world press, they’re not going to pick up on any of the beautiful things that Francis said, and he did say some really beautiful things.  They’re only going to go with: Catholics need to stop being obsessive about family values and abortion and sexual preferences.  That really is pretty much what he said.  Here’s what Dreher writes about this.  The pope says:

[reading]

“‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff.” Then the pope whispers in Latin: “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.” [Mike: Beautiful stuff, and now Dreher.]

There we see the humility that has made Francis so beloved so quickly.  The America interview is full of passages like these. I strongly encourage all readers to read the entire thing to grasp the Pope’s sex-and-abortion comments in full context. But those comments are undeniably very, very troubling to theological conservatives, or should be. Here’s that passage in full:

“I see clearly,” the pope continues, “that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds…. And you have to start from the ground up.

“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. [Mike: You mean like the Extraordinary Latin Mass, Pope Francis? Good grief!] The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all. The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much of a rigorist or too lax.

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“Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent. The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return. But that takes audacity and courage.”

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials . . .

[end reading]

Mike:  Some of what’s being said here is: Look, we have these customs and traditions and there are too many people relying on them.  In order to comport with the world as it is today, we’re going to have to adjust what it is we do.  We’re going to have to stop talking about these things and being so rigid about them.  If you can’t rely on God himself and on his representative here on Earth on being the one thing that is not malleable, the one thing that is a constant, the one thing that is reliable, the one thing that is beautiful, the one thing that is sacred, the gifts that come to us in the form of sacraments, what can you rely on?  What is left?  There is nothing but the rule of man now.  We’ll just let Jay-Z make up what the Church does next, how about that?  We’ll just let Amanda Bines make up the Church’s stance on reality.  [mocking] “We’ve got these kids out there and, after all, kids are gonna do it.  We really can’t demonize them anymore.  Besides, who believes in angels and demons anymore?  We need to get beyond all this.”  So in other words, the religious need to stop being religious.

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My friends, I don’t know if you realize it or not, that is as profound a statement as anyone has made in the last century and a half.  When the leader of the Catholic Church, the largest Christian church organization on Earth, on the planet that God gave us and blessed us with, when the leader of that faith says that that faith is not a faith at all, that it is a club we go to that’s constantly evaluating what it does and then adjusts its ground game — one of the things you learn is you’re supposed to learn this thing called doctrine.  How does something become a doctrine?  It becomes a doctrine because it’s doctrinal.  How does it become sacred?  It becomes sacred because God said it or God sent a prophet to say it.  Are you saying then that the prophets were wrong?

Are you saying that Augustine, God’s representative here on Earth, in whose hand he placed a pen and inspired him and told him to write, are you saying that Augustine is wrong?  Are you saying that St. Thomas Aquinas, in whose hand also our Lord placed a pen and told him to write the Summa Theologica, are you saying that Aquinas was wrong?  Maybe he wasn’t completely divinely inspired.  These things are just very troubling to those that think some things are worthy of conserving and some things need to be constant.  I would say we all agree that the need to not murder our neighbors is a constant.

AG:  It’s one of the things that we talked about when the pope was being chosen.  Was it, from the Catholic Channel, Father John?

Mike:  Yeah, Father John visited with us.

AG:  Is the role of the Catholic Church going forward to increase its numbers?  Does a statement like this have more broader appeal to potentially bring people in, or should they instead be circling the wagons and reinforcing the Catholic Church doctrine?  Are those two ideas opposed?

Mike:  I don’t think they’re opposed.  You have the physical and you have the spiritual.  In the physical, the world is always changing. This is part of the way it works.  We’re always in chaos, although there is not chaos because there is actually a plan.  If you are a person of faith, then God has a plan.  In that change, if we’re talking about man and mankind, and if we’re talking about man’s pursuit of religion and man’s pursuit of spirits, and spirit has always been something that has been done so that he has a belief that his actions on Earth are going to be accounted for in the next life.  This is why you don’t do certain things and why you do do certain things.

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If there’s not something that is reliable, that is sturdy, that is faithful to its own faith — this is what, to me, is so disturbing about this.  If you’re not going to be faithful to your own faith, how can you expect anyone else to be faithful to it?  I submit to you that the church’s downfall began after, that we’ve seen the decline after Vatican II.  Instead of the Church standing tall and saying: You guys got this sexual revolution and all that stuff happening.  It’s wrong.  We’re not going to go along to get along.  We’re going to continue to condemn it as we should condemn it.  We’re going to continue to condemn modernity as we should condemn modernity.  We should encourage you to live the life of the faithful.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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