thistle:
How can you claim to be a Catholic and believe this rubbish???
Thistle,
Hello - I believe perhaps you are reading too much into Desert’s comments. He will have to speak for himself on that, but what is it exactly that you take issue with? He has yet to present some evidence for us to actually see.
Is it that there may be people in powerful positions in the Church that are bad examples of fidelity Catholic faithfulness? Or maybe not even “powerful positions,” maybe just on the dioscesian level, some bad lemons here and there?
There’s something called “* latae*
sententiae " (as opposed to
"ferendae sententiae”)
excommunication. The basic idea is that a person is cut off from the church by virtue of what they believe, deny, or do. Abortion, or the assistance thereof, for instance. Automatic excommunication. Doesnt’ require the Roman Bishop, or any Bishop, to pronounce the ruling there. It just “is.” There’s more to it than that, but suffice to say that obstinate Satanists are not “in” the Catholic Church. Was it the Novations, or Donatists, I forget, a council said all the rulings made by them were null and void. Why, because the men weren’t Catholic, they didn’t have authority. Let me look it up real quick… Yeah, it was at Ephesus (against Nestorians), the
Synodical Letter about the expulsion of the Eastern Bishops. I quote:
If any **clerics **either in city or country have been suspended by Nestorius and those with him from their priesthood because of their orthodoxy, we have thought it right that these should regain their proper rank;
**Whoever **have been condemned of improper practices by the holy synod or by their own bishops, and have been uncanonically restored to communion and rank by Nestorius or his sympathisers, with their habitual lack of discrimination, such persons we have decreed gain nothing by this and are to remain deposed as before.
Similarly if **anyone **should wish in any way to upset the decisions in each point taken in the holy synod of Ephesus, the holy synod decides that if they are bishops or clerics they should be completely deprived of their own rank and if they are *laity *they should be excommunicated.
You may say, “well, they just lose their office” Ok, but they do lose that, latae sententiae, that’s the modern view, for, I guess maybe 1000 years now.
I’m not implying that Pope Paul VI was a satanist. I’d affirm the opposite, that he was a good Pope, as far as what I have been able to see.