Bishop scared me

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I am very, very grateful to and thankful for the people on this thread who have tried to help me see a different angle so that I can overcome my concern.
Do you experience any kinds of “obsessions” in your life?
 
Do you experience any kinds of “obsessions” in your life?
In all seriousness, I don’t believe that I do in the way that I think you mean.

Was there a particular reason you asked?
I could still always use prayers.
 
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@steve-b He’s referencing this quote from the Pope, where the Pope is not saying that God doesn’t exist PERIOD, but rather that false ideas of him are incorrect. That God is not simply some unreachable far off being, but rather is near at hand. Here’s the full context:

“You pray - said the Pope - with a friend, who is your companion on life’s journey, you pray with the Father and you pray in the Holy Spirit. The friend is Jesus”:

“He accompanies us and teaches us to pray. And our prayer should be Trinitarian. So often [people ask]: ‘But do you believe?’: 'Yes! Yes! '; ‘What do you believe in?’; ‘In God!’; ‘But what is God for you?’; ‘God, God’. But God does not exist: Do not be shocked! So God does not exist! There is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, they are persons, they are not some vague idea in the clouds … This God spray does not exist! The three persons exist! Jesus is our companion on the journey who gives us what we ask; the Father who cares for us and loves us; and the Holy Spirit is the gift, the extra gift from the Father, that our consciousness does not dare to hope for”.

The Holy Father EXPLICITLY states that God exists in Three Persons, then enumerates each one of the Three Persons. How much clearer can he possibly get?
It was a deceptive question to begin with.
 
He asked me about something the Pope recently said, “Christ failed on the cross” but didn’t give me the context. He said that in any context he couldn’t imagine Christ failing in any way on the cross.

What is your take on this? Have you heard of that quote?
Yes, I remember that quote, and you know what? I think Pope Francis borrowed that from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:
1 Corinthians 1:18-25

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the learning of the learned I will set aside.”

Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith. For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
If you get a chance, pass that along to the evangelist who asked you about it.
 
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steve-b:
Who is this bishop? Where is he?
Rome. I did not mean to be deceptive. I wanted to know what people thought of what was said.
Apparently you left out the context. That makes the question and the charge, deceptive.
 
I think it is time to call a cease fire. We are getting responses from earlier posts while later posts seem to have smoothed things out. Read down the thread and give @Teek a break now! 💖
 
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I haven’t read all the posts, so I apologize if this has already been stated, but I think it’s also worth mentioning that this is from a homily Pope Francis gave at Santa Marta (i.e. where he lives). These homilies are much more informal and off the cuff. These homilies do not appear on the Vatican website under his homilies. They don’t receive the same amount of attention towards translation. There is no “official” translation. All you get are snippets of translations in news articles.

All this is to say that in these cases it is much easier for us English-speaking Americans to get confused as we are only seeing portions of an informal homily translated for a news article.

If you look at the larger context, I don’t see how anyone could walk away thinking that the Pope is either an atheist or that he denies the oneness of God. That’s not a reasonable nor fair characterization of Pope Francis’ thoughts.
 
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Let me ask you, why wouldn’t a Catholic give the Pope the benefit of the doubt?
There was another thread that hashed out the Greek text for the Our Father and whether it would be acceptable to change the English translation.

The main argument against changing it could be stated as “Why wouldn’t a Catholic give almost 2000 years of unanimous Church teaching the benefit of the doubt?”

The main argument for changing it was, “Because of pastoral concerns: people hear ‘lead us not into temptation’ and think we mean God tempts us. We don’t want to confuse people.”

In this case, you ask, “why wouldn’t a Catholic give the Pope the benefit of the doubt?”

The best explanation I can give is this:

“Because of pastoral concerns. People hear that he said, ‘God does not exist,’ and think he means what he said. We don’t want to confuse people.”
 
If you’re Catholic, you believe the Pope is also. And that his words should be interpreted as a Catholic.
This is what I was trying to do. I looked at his comments in light of infallible Church teaching on the Trinity, and it scared me that he said those things.

I wasn’t trying to spread my interpretation of what he said. I was asking for other people’s interpretations so that I could find one that “made the Pope Catholic” again for me even in what he said in that homily, not just in spite of what he said in that homily.

Most people here believe my interpretation was inherently flawed. And that I am too. The first might be true, the second definitely is.

But this thread was because I am Catholic, I love our Church and our faith, and I don’t want to continue to believe the Pope said something un-Catholic.

No one has to believe that. But that is what happened.
 
Excellent, beautiful point.

This non-demoninational preacher guy pointed out it was bad leadership, by that standard he criticizes Paul, who said something along the same lines.

Anybody could say about Paul, he said the cross is foolishness, what bad leadership as a Christian.

Thus confirms the danger of taking text out of context.
 
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De_Maria:
Let me ask you, why wouldn’t a Catholic give the Pope the benefit of the doubt?
There was another thread that hashed out the Greek text for the Our Father and whether it would be acceptable to change the English translation.

The main argument against changing it could be stated as “Why wouldn’t a Catholic give almost 2000 years of unanimous Church teaching the benefit of the doubt?”

The main argument for changing it was, “Because of pastoral concerns: people hear ‘lead us not into temptation’ and think we mean God tempts us. We don’t want to confuse people.”

In this case, you ask, “why wouldn’t a Catholic give the Pope the benefit of the doubt?”

The best explanation I can give is this:

“Because of pastoral concerns. People hear that he said, ‘God does not exist,’ and think he means what he said. We don’t want to confuse people.”
But they (apart from the tiniest deeply misguided minority) do NOT think that the Pope was even hinting that he doesn’t believe in God’s existence! Not at all! Not close!

If they had, the speech would’ve been front page of every newspaper and top of every news bulletin in the world, with “POPE IS AN ATHEIST!” and “POPE SAYS GOD DOES NOT EXIST!” and similar headlines in letters ten feet tall.
 
I think it’s also worth mentioning that this is from a homily Pope Francis gave at Santa Marta (i.e. where he lives). These homilies are much more informal and off the cuff. These homilies do not appear on the Vatican website under his homilies. They don’t receive the same amount of attention towards translation. There is no “official” translation. All you get are snippets of translations in news articles.
You are very right about this.

Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis (and Pope St. John Paul II, with a little less internet) live in an unprecedented time because every single thing they say is up for scrutiny by people with all kinds of motives. They didn’t have the same concerns when it took a convoy of men on horseback and a cross Atlantic ship-rigged sail ship for people on a different continent to hear about the Holy Father’s private household homily.

And you are right about the translation being more suspect because of that informality.
If you look at the larger context, I don’t see how anyone could walk away thinking that the Pope is either an atheist or that he denies the oneness of God. That’s not a reasonable nor fair characterization of Pope Francis’ thoughts.
Well, I did. And I was worried. Call me all the names many people here have if you want (though I am grateful that you didn’t) but I was being sincere in my concern.
 
But they (apart from the tiniest deeply misguided minority) do NOT think that the Pope was even hinting that he doesn’t believe in God’s existence! Not at all! Not close!
That was not my experience. I heard about this homily from a Hindu man (one who accepts Buddha, something to do with the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, which is entirely beside the point) who used it to throw my Catholic beliefs in my face.

I never thought the Holy Father doesn’t believe in God’s existence, but I was worried that his teaching was problematic according to Catholic teaching on the Trinity, which is central to our faith.

So I asked Catholics what they thought.
 
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Most people here believe my interpretation was inherently flawed. And that I am too. The first might be true, the second definitely is.
Lol! 😀 Don’t take it so seriously. All of us are flawed.

Anyway, I think Pope Francis likes to scare people. Hopefully he’s scaring everyone straight.
I don’t want to continue to believe the Pope said something un-Catholic.
Put your faith in the Holy Spirit. For 2000 years, He’s protected the Catholic Church. If you don’t trust the Pope, trust Him.
 
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LilyM:
But they (apart from the tiniest deeply misguided minority) do NOT think that the Pope was even hinting that he doesn’t believe in God’s existence! Not at all! Not close!
That was not my experience. I heard about this homily from a Hindu man (one who accepts Buddha, something to do with the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, which is entirely beside the point) who used it to throw my Catholic beliefs in my face.

I never thought the Holy Father doesn’t believe in God’s existence, but I was worried that his teaching was problematic according to Catholic teaching on the Trinity, which is central to our faith.

So I asked Catholics what they thought.
So one Hindu/Busdhist person (who toy seem to think can neither be in the minority nor misguided) takes the Pope’s words to mean what, exactly?
 
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So one Hindu/Busdhist person (who toy seem to think can neither be in the minority nor misguided) takes the Pope’s words to mean what, exactly?
If you’d like, you could read the posts in this thread and see if your accusations were already made and responded to.

Or just finish reading the one I replied to you with that says what it meant to me.
 
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LilyM:
So one Hindu/Busdhist person (who toy seem to think can neither be in the minority nor misguided) takes the Pope’s words to mean what, exactly?
If you’d like, you could read the posts in this thread and see if your accusations were already made and responded to.
So the Hindu/Buddhist (who, I repeat, you seem to think cannot possibly be in the minority or misguided) thinks.the Pope is not Trinitarian?

The same Pope who says or attends Mass at least weekly if not daily, and so weekly if not daily prays the Creed - the one which begins “I believe IN ONE GOD” and goes on to define that One God as Trinity?

Why does this Hindu/Buddhist’s - I repeat minority and misguided - opinion carry weight in the slightest?
 
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Honestly, sometimes these Threads scare me more than the Pope ever could 😨
 
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