J
Jerry_Parker
Guest
Hi, Memaw,
You wrote: *Maybe you should check with Catholic Answers for information on many of the things that trouble you, I am sorry you find so-o-o-o much fault with our beloved Popes. I have lived through many of them, starting with Pius the XII and although I was born during Pius XI, I was too little to remember him. They were all Holy and beloved Popes, chosen by the Holy Spirit to lead us through the troubled times of their Pontificate. The Holy Spirit DOES know what HE is doing even if we can’t see it. Sometimes we let our narrow little wants blind us from seeing the whole picture of God’s Holy Will. I follow the Catholic Church and her Pope, guided by the Holy Spirit for 2,000 years, thru all kinds of trials, heresies, schisms, persecutions etc. I pray every day for Christian Unity, TRUE Christian Unity. That is what Our Lord wanted and prayed for himself. I doubt we will ever have peace until we are all ONE in HIM. HIS will not ours. *
I don’t think that you yet have gotten my point about recent (or earlier and better) popes. I was not dealing with the question of papal infallibility. For some reason, popes since John XIII have so sought popularity and wide acceptance that the Papacy has become little more that a lot of “P.R.” (public relations). Popes before Vatican II followed (with rather little fanfare) what seemed right to them, not just feebly so as has been the case with popes from Paul VI onwards, but despite whatever the world might have thought of them. Urging the Popes to be more resolute, to restore what has so decayed in the Church, is not to deny the place of the Papacy, but to urge the holders of “St. Peter’s Throne” to live up to it!
Anyway, all of these post-Vat II popes whom we have mentioned could have been much worse than, fortunately, they have been. However, their mediocrity does not make heroes of them, even if at least they have not themselves succombed to the worst excesses of the post-conciliar Church. I am not alone in regarding Paul VI as a tragic figure. He made so many concessions to the most liberal and unbelieving in the ranks of the clergy and of the theologians, including the Jesuits and other unfaithful religious orders, that his authority and that of his office suffered greatly. When, finally, Paul VI realised how much his misplaced generosity had cost him, he tried, in one last splendid effort, to regain the lost terrain when he opposed birth control in his heroic encyclical, Humanae vitae. Alas, by then papal power had so eroded that Paul VI’s gesture counted for very little. His sorrow at how he had sacrificied the Papacy for the sake of popularity, before that encyclical, surely drove him to an early demise when so many demeaned and villianised him for his righteous stand on birth control.
John-Paul II and Benedict XVI have made efforts to restore the authority of the tarnished papacy, but J.-P. II simply did not face the problems in the Church with enough resolve and early enough in his papacy to turn the tide of so much rampant decay and apostasy that just worsened later, when his strength to rise to the challenge was too enervated from physical decline to do much of that.
Anyway, despite all the overemphasis on the Papacy, as the newspapers rise to the bait of the paradigm of “Pope as Public Relations (Madison Ave.) Doddering Grandpapa Figure”, one always must recall that the Church is far more than the Vatican!
Anyway, the Church gets the Popes that it deserves, just as lax popes get the Church which they, for their part, deserve. This was true of the Borgia Popes and it still is of today’s P.R.-obsessed Papacy; the Holy Spirit seems to assure that sort of match between Church and Pope, too!
Anyway, I tried to change the subject by dealing with what is good and lovely in Catholicism, with its rich heritage and lore of spiritual riches, which so surpass in worth and importance the shallow modern-day media-driven “personality cult” of recent Popes, but you, Memaw, persist like a dog with a bone to revert to the tiresome question of too unconditional approval of Papal image. Remember, Memaw, that THE CHURCH (BEING THE BODY OF CHRIST) IS GREATER THAN ITS PRINCES! I may be wrong (as I know that I have been in the past all too often), but I strongly suspect that excessive emphasis and attention to the occupiers of the Holy See, especially when so accenting their individual personalities unduly (as the sectaries adulate the tinselled glamour of their TV evangelist “preacher boys”), is no way to attract serious inquirers to the Holy Catholic Faith.
Well, Memaw, I am with you in urging Catholic Christians to seek their unity principally and overridingly in Christ, as you so rightly urge at the end of your comments!
Jerry Parker
You wrote: *Maybe you should check with Catholic Answers for information on many of the things that trouble you, I am sorry you find so-o-o-o much fault with our beloved Popes. I have lived through many of them, starting with Pius the XII and although I was born during Pius XI, I was too little to remember him. They were all Holy and beloved Popes, chosen by the Holy Spirit to lead us through the troubled times of their Pontificate. The Holy Spirit DOES know what HE is doing even if we can’t see it. Sometimes we let our narrow little wants blind us from seeing the whole picture of God’s Holy Will. I follow the Catholic Church and her Pope, guided by the Holy Spirit for 2,000 years, thru all kinds of trials, heresies, schisms, persecutions etc. I pray every day for Christian Unity, TRUE Christian Unity. That is what Our Lord wanted and prayed for himself. I doubt we will ever have peace until we are all ONE in HIM. HIS will not ours. *
I don’t think that you yet have gotten my point about recent (or earlier and better) popes. I was not dealing with the question of papal infallibility. For some reason, popes since John XIII have so sought popularity and wide acceptance that the Papacy has become little more that a lot of “P.R.” (public relations). Popes before Vatican II followed (with rather little fanfare) what seemed right to them, not just feebly so as has been the case with popes from Paul VI onwards, but despite whatever the world might have thought of them. Urging the Popes to be more resolute, to restore what has so decayed in the Church, is not to deny the place of the Papacy, but to urge the holders of “St. Peter’s Throne” to live up to it!
Anyway, all of these post-Vat II popes whom we have mentioned could have been much worse than, fortunately, they have been. However, their mediocrity does not make heroes of them, even if at least they have not themselves succombed to the worst excesses of the post-conciliar Church. I am not alone in regarding Paul VI as a tragic figure. He made so many concessions to the most liberal and unbelieving in the ranks of the clergy and of the theologians, including the Jesuits and other unfaithful religious orders, that his authority and that of his office suffered greatly. When, finally, Paul VI realised how much his misplaced generosity had cost him, he tried, in one last splendid effort, to regain the lost terrain when he opposed birth control in his heroic encyclical, Humanae vitae. Alas, by then papal power had so eroded that Paul VI’s gesture counted for very little. His sorrow at how he had sacrificied the Papacy for the sake of popularity, before that encyclical, surely drove him to an early demise when so many demeaned and villianised him for his righteous stand on birth control.
John-Paul II and Benedict XVI have made efforts to restore the authority of the tarnished papacy, but J.-P. II simply did not face the problems in the Church with enough resolve and early enough in his papacy to turn the tide of so much rampant decay and apostasy that just worsened later, when his strength to rise to the challenge was too enervated from physical decline to do much of that.
Anyway, despite all the overemphasis on the Papacy, as the newspapers rise to the bait of the paradigm of “Pope as Public Relations (Madison Ave.) Doddering Grandpapa Figure”, one always must recall that the Church is far more than the Vatican!
Anyway, the Church gets the Popes that it deserves, just as lax popes get the Church which they, for their part, deserve. This was true of the Borgia Popes and it still is of today’s P.R.-obsessed Papacy; the Holy Spirit seems to assure that sort of match between Church and Pope, too!
Anyway, I tried to change the subject by dealing with what is good and lovely in Catholicism, with its rich heritage and lore of spiritual riches, which so surpass in worth and importance the shallow modern-day media-driven “personality cult” of recent Popes, but you, Memaw, persist like a dog with a bone to revert to the tiresome question of too unconditional approval of Papal image. Remember, Memaw, that THE CHURCH (BEING THE BODY OF CHRIST) IS GREATER THAN ITS PRINCES! I may be wrong (as I know that I have been in the past all too often), but I strongly suspect that excessive emphasis and attention to the occupiers of the Holy See, especially when so accenting their individual personalities unduly (as the sectaries adulate the tinselled glamour of their TV evangelist “preacher boys”), is no way to attract serious inquirers to the Holy Catholic Faith.
Well, Memaw, I am with you in urging Catholic Christians to seek their unity principally and overridingly in Christ, as you so rightly urge at the end of your comments!
Jerry Parker
). At my former congregation, we followed a watered-down version of a liturgical calender (Lent and Advent were the same, but almost every other day outside of that was Ordinary Time). From age 16 on, I felt like Peggy Lee in the song “Is That All There Is?”… everything was nice and there were some truths proclaimed… but most of what I heard proclaimed was just enough truth to make the rest of the message (falsehoods and heresays) palitable.