When I say he took vows, what I mean is he took a vow to JOIN THE ORDER. Not any particular promise thereof. He did take a vow to join SOLT and be under their authority, did he not? Or is there something I am missing?I do not know how many times this have been said…;but he did not take vows! He took promises! Here is an succint explanation of the difference;Code:
Priests (diocesan but also Fr Corapi) do not take any vows. Instead, they make promises to remain celibate for the sake of building up the kingdom of God, to be obedient to the bishop, and to live a life of pastoral poverty (i.e. striving to live as free and detached from material goods to the degree that his ministry affords).
The difference between a vow and a promise is that vows are much more binding for the person making them, and they can only be rescinded in extreme circumstances. Promises can be revoked in less serious circumstances. When a diocesan priest is laicized (removed from active ministry by his bishop), he is no longer bound to the promises of obedience to the bishop, and pastoral poverty. However, he must receive a special dispensation from Rome to rescind the promise to live a celibate life.
vocationstoronto.ca/priesthood.htm
Mom4mary, honestly, I think his support is going to rapidly dwindle. He has a few people still rabidly supporting him, but I don’t think it’s as many as he believes there to be. I also think quite a lot of his current audience are not even Catholics, may in fact be anti-Catholic. I think he will pick up a few more of those individuals as time goes by, but if he thinks he is going to become the next Michael Savage or Rush Limbaugh, he should have another long think! He isn’t even that famous among Catholics…I think he’s let Twitter and Facebook go to his head. Someone is helping him with his image re-branding, someone is telling him all about podcasting, etc. and those people may be using him to achieve some purpose of their own (maybe just getting a salary). He sounds like he’s gone a little loony, honestly, with all this paranoid talk of “I’m not dead, I’m still here,” and “I won’t crawl under a rock and die.”Look, obviously when he became a priest, it was understood by those around him that doing so was a very serious decision** on his part** and those who ordained him (namely, Bl. John Paul II) were led by him to believe that he was serious and sincere in choosing to follow was was presumed to be a calling to this vocation. I do not buy the argument that Fr. Corapi just somehow didn’t understand the seriousness of what he was doing, or that it’s okay to “just stop” becoming a priest now because he has decided to change his persona from Catholic priest to The Black Sheep Dog. Honestly, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully to either Fr. Corapi or any of you here at CAF, but how is it that one human being (Fr. Corapi) has been able to evoke such a response from his following that almost all sense of logic and reason is suspended in favor of trying to exonerate and validate him in doing things that are in the worst case dangerous or in the least case extraordinarily odd and out of character for a priest. Also, he has not be laicized at this point, so he still considered a priest, albeit a suspended one.