How to forgive Pope Francis

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graciew said:
Now,it must be extremely difficult to have the world as an audience every time you utter a word.

Now when our priest gives a homily,we follow it in the context of the day ,the week,the month,as an ongoing opportunity to learn about Jesus and our Church and grow.

Can you more or less get what I am trying to tell you so far ,Teek?
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Yes. He is the only priest (not just a priest, but for this point only) that has a global audience for every word uttered. He can be “forgiven” for not saying everything the exact way that every person in the world can fully understand since that is impossible, and that is his audience.

Impossible task.

He does a remarkably good job at a terribly difficult task.

And, like our own parish priests, his local audience knows him better—knows the rythym of his teachings, the nuances of his sense of humor, and at his personal Church family he can assume they “get” him, when he would be much more careful for a larger audience.

That is what you are telling me? I like that. It lets the Holy Father be human and holy at the same time.
 
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Yes,this is what I am trying to tell you,Teek.
That was a smooth understanding in this brief conversation.
 
I do not hold a grudge against him, though I reserve the right to think he is not a great Pope. I don’t think he is a bad man and I think much of the alienation and division you are referencing among practicing Catholics under his pontificate is not necessarily his fault. But he does not seem to be finding ways to heal these divisions and it is an open question to my mind if he desires them to be healed. The FACT that this is even an open question entitles one to question his suitability as the Good Shepherd of the Church. Is it just red tape, bad advisors, mismanagement, well then, so be it. I have stopped worrying about it if that makes you feel any better. And I don’t think a lot about the Pope either way - so I don’t know what I am forgiving. There is just no connection there. And that is ok. It made me realize where the Catholic Church is at these days. As opposed to where I am.
 
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You could scroll up, but I’ll put it here:
OneSheep said:
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SuperLuigi:
Don’t listen to them, Teek. They’re trying to use Pope Francis as a deflector shield to implement a liberal agenda. Their agenda cannot stand on its own merit and fails, so that’s why they have to use these gimmicks.
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“They”?
SuperLuigi said:
On a scale of 1-10, how stupid do you think we are?
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“We”?

I want to thank you for bringing up the ingroup/outgroup dimension of the whole picture. As you may remember, Jesus addressed this whole dimension in not-so-subtle ways.

In the time of His ministry, the Jews had many “outgroups”, like we all naturally develop. Their most resented outgroup were the Roman occupiers, of course. Jesus broke through this boundary by eating with some of them. Another outgroup were the Samaritans, who considered themselves Jewish but had a different “mountain”, a different holy/political center, and they were more “liberal” in that they supposedly incorporated some aspects of other religions (this is from what I remember). Jesus used a Samaritan as an example of a person who behaved in a merciful way, as opposed to people of status in His own ingroup (the good Samaritan story).

Tax collectors were also a sub-outgroup, sort of grouped with “sinners” in general, but they were particularly hated (for understandable reasons), yet Jesus did not exclude them from His circle.

I apologize if this sounds like a lecture, but please have the patience to hear me out on this.

One purpose of Eucharist is that we form a Body that worships together and can trust one another. Because so much of modern life is found “outside the Church” for people, they naturally come to form other other trust groups, and though those trust groups in the past were based more on race or ethnicity, in our multicultural society people have come to form trust groups (ingroups) around political/ideological affiliations. (As well as sports teams!🙂)

One error occurs when one group claims that people of one particular political/ideological affiliation are themselves more worthy of the Eucharist than the other. Do you agree with this?

And then we have the other issue of those who consider Eucharist (in the context of the community of believers, a shared meal) less important than political ideology. Would you agree, also, that this runs contrary to Jesus’ ministry, as I described His words and actions above?

So, before we go any further, I extend my hand to you, SuperLuigi. Can we be “we”? 👐
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People need to learn a little humility. Ok a LOT of humility, they blame others for their own self centered faults. “I know what’s best, I’ve developed my own ‘facts’ to prove it you are all wrong and must be silent!” It’s not just here in America, it’s world wide. It’s fine, as the musician Sting put it, to say " I don’t subscribe to your point of view…" But not to judge them beneath you and in need of your forgiveness. We are all guilty go some degree of that, and we all need to do better.

Those who want to pick up their marbles and go home can do so without buring bridges behind them. Someday they want to return.
 
Regardless of the question of AL one way or another, the sacraments and commandments still stand. People are ultimately responsible for their own final judgment and the state of their souls; incidentally even the liberal interpretation of discernment of conscience, applied consistently, is a double-edged sword with respect to AL. Unless the Pope has personally wronged someone, the question of forgiveness should be moot.
 
Fidveritas said:
Unless the Pope has personally wronged someone, the question of forgiveness should be moot.
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Well, to me this thinking is part of the problem. Jesus guides us with “If you hold anything against anyone…” which does not necessarily involve some kind of personal wrong done against someone. Mark 11:25, as I stated in the OP, has more to do with resentment.

There are plenty of people who resent certain leaders, right? And we don’t even think that forgiveness applies; resenting Donald Trump or Barack Obama is somehow just fine, even perfectly “Christian” to do.
 
OneSheep said:
I scratch my head about this “conflict”, actually. Please help me on this.
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There are Bishops teaching one thing in one part of the world and the opposite in another part of the world. This is a “doctrinal conflict” about an objective truth and it would be much better to have an open dialogue about it, or to answer the concerns brought forward by Cardinals with sound theological evidence that there is only one of the two responses that is consistent with Church teaching.
OneSheep said:
Could you describe a situation in a parish, perhaps? I do not mean to put down your concerns, I need to be informed.
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I have two examples from close friends in my parish who have publically shared their concerns.

The first was divorced after a horrible public political scandal regarding the fidelity of her husband. She was a young mother of three. She suffered a lot, found a man who cherished her and remarried outside the Church because of her anger about what she endured. Fast forward ten years, they have two children together and they find faith again together and seek to return to the Church. He had no intention of seeking a decree of annulment, and so they were accompanied to the understanding that they had a choice to make if they were to return to the Sacraments. He was insulted, and she wanted to pacify him, so they refrained from receiving the Sacraments. Within about six months my friend was weeping through the entire Eucharistic Liturgy. She longed for the Lord. Her husband saw her pain and wanted to help her and it broke away some hardness of heart and he saw the healing the Lord offered that he was refusing for his entire family, and he sought the annulment.

My friend now speaks publicly about what the experience taught her about Who we receive in the Eucharist—about how she took Him for granted her entire life as a Catholic, and how she believes He accompanied her through the worst of it just to lead her to the awareness she now has, because the knowledge of Christ’s true presence in the Eucharist is the center of joy.

When Amoris Laetitia was released she was nervous. When Pope Francis endorsed the letter approving admitting the divorced and remarried to Communion as the only response to AL, she came to my house and demanded that I explain why she had to suffer so much if it didn’t really matter. She demanded how anyone in her situation could find Truth if they were left in their tepid indifference. She was so conflicted and confused.

So are a lot of us. But it isn’t necessarily what he meant! And then he won’t tell us. So we are left to conclude for ourselves and that is a dangerous proposition. He could so easily simply explain.
 
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The second was a friend who divorced and remarried. His wife was Catholic, and so he converted. He did not fully believe in the presence of Jesus in the Sacrament, and considered praying to Mary and Eucharistic Adoration to be idolatry. We met for several months and debated his reasoning. The Incarnation broke through his stubbornness about who Mary is and the honor she deserves, but he couldn’t break through his concern about “worshipping bread”, not even with John 6 or with Christ’s assurance about His Church—namely “not even the gates of Hell will stand against it.”

He thought getting more involved would help him, only to be told by our pastor that he could not be an extra-ordinary minister or a lector unless he was living free of objective mortal sin. He was LIVID. He called me and ranted for ten minutes and hung up. I thought we lost him. One week later he asked me to meet with him, as we had been regularly doing.

He went on and on about how angry he had been and that suddenly, he realized that we really meant it—we really meant that “It Is The LORD.” It broke through.

When he heard about AL, he said, “If I had been in one of the diocese that accepted this garbage, I would never have accepted the Eucharist.”
 
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You’re correct. I needed italics around the “should” to make the point I was driving at, however.
 
Thanks, OneSheep. I don’t see the numbers anywhere in the post and it is a pain to scroll up and up and not know when you hit 122 anyway.

I am with you on the Eucharist and the universal Church. I consider you my fellow Christian. I think Pope Francis was a (God sent?) catalyst for me to really evaluate the sincerity and seriousness of my Catholicism - something perhaps I should have done years ago. I do see a huge difference in the focus of the Church from Pope to Pope. I don’t like the factional infighting and I can honestly say that I believe that much of so called liberal branch wants the so called traditionalists out and I have no desire to be in this kind of environment let alone profess it the Church of Christ. I steer clear of the Pope for my own peace of mind. And the good of my faith, which still sees you as my brethren. So I landed on my feet, and the Pope carries on his merry way, as do you, as do I. The world spins on - by the grace of God. Peace to all.
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Please, the patronizing slow wind up to all too “conditioned forgiveness” point you eventually got to was far more transparent than you realize. I could see it 3 posts ago.

‘Can you see" "Can you see’.

Are you a pre-school teacher by chance?

I am not conditioning my forgiveness. I am waiting for the wrecking to end.

I am simply doing what the father of the Prodigal son did…wait. That’s not “conditioning”; it’s just waiting.

Yes, I am very concerned that deliberately sowing confusion and playing too clever (sticking major points into footnotes of AL). It’s downright deceptive.
 
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@Edward_H You are the Father of this “Prodigal?” Poor, backwards choice of analogy. This is the Pope, and as much is certain at the very least until such a time as this teaching’s flawed interpretation is declared final ex cathedra. This is not yours to forgive. You’ll find fewer critics of the Latin Bishop interpretation of AL as fervent as I am, but to be so sure you can read into the mind and intentions of someone else is preposterous. Do not give in to such temptations. You appear to have some things very much backwards.
 
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OneSheep said:
Even when the hierarchy makes doctrine as clear as possible for people, every single human reads it with a different vocabulary, vocabularies based on completely different sets of life experiences. Doctrine can never take the place of Eucharist, right? It cannot ever take the place of acknowledging that we are the Body of Christ.
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That we are the Body of Christ IS doctrine. That is why it can’t be replaced.

The reason that the Magisterium teaches with one voice, the voice of the Church, is because, as you said, “Even when the hierarchy makes doctrine as clear as possible for people, every single human reads it with a different vocabulary.” Therefore we rely on the Magisterium to teach us unambiguously.

When we are given new interpretations that are confusing we need clarification.

It isn’t a criticism of the Pope or a lack of good will. It is just the way things are. We will get it wrong if it’s left to us and to our consciences. That is why Christ instituted the Church in the first place.
 
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