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Crackdown ordered on American nuns

TragicMonkey said:
"The ship is starting to sink, Captain! What should we do?"
"Target our hull and fire a volley of torpedos! That should help us stay afloat!"

For a religion that's against any form of suicide, it does seem hellbent on killing itself off.
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I don't think it realizes how bad off it really is. The current whacky Vicar of Christ is so removed I don't think he really understands how unimportant he is. He talks about birth control and gets ignored. Neither major US party has an agenda he can support and Catholics are the largest single denomination in the country.

What really surprises me here is the risk they took. The nuns could simply ignore the RCC. Then what? The RCC risks everyone seeing how little power they really have.
 
Craig4 said:
Have those naughty nuns been lighting the grail shaped beacon again?
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Maybe that's what their spokesperson Sister Campbell means when she says, as reported by the BBC: "I don't think the bishops realise what they're in for".

Whatever she has in mind: Go for it, sister!
 
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Craig4 said:
I don't think it realizes how bad off it really is. The current whacky Vicar of Christ is so removed I don't think he really understands how unimportant he is. He talks about birth control and gets ignored. Neither major US party has an agenda he can support and Catholics are the largest single denomination in the country.

What really surprises me here is the risk they took. The nuns could simply ignore the RCC. Then what? The RCC risks everyone seeing how little power they really have.
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Airing the whole "birth control is a sin" thing again was a mistake. Ever since the Pill hit the market, otherwise devout Catholic women have been taking it. Four or more kids is simply not feasible for most families. The Church has been looking the other way for decades because it knew that churchgoing Catholic women outnumber the men by a good bit. And in "mixed" marriages it's usually the mother's religion that gets passed on to the kids. Pissing off women is the fastest way to empty pews. Does the Church honestly believe that demonizing contraception will fill its congregations with happy born Catholics? It won't. It will remove the women and their planned-for children permanently.

When I was a kid and dragged to church, you saw ten women for every man present, and half of those women were senior citizens. What's it look like, now? Between contraception and all those sex scandals, whose supposed to show up to church anymore? I come from a Catholic family. The only churchgoers among us now are the surviving siblings of my grandmother, and they're all over eighty years old. Nobody in the three generations after them goes. Why would they? It's a different world, and increasingly incompatible with reality. Two thousand years is a good run, but about a hundred years too many.
 
Come on oh Eternal Catholic Church, come on. Your dogmas and the rules you play by are "eternal", right? So why not just do to these nuns what you would have done say about 300 years ago? What has changed since then? Why are you letting those evil secular humanists and liberals tie your hands? Even if you lose this fight, history will say you went down fighting!

Don't forget how much more powerful you were centuries ago! People trembled at the thought of doing or thinking anything heretical in Catholic lands. When the Pope spoke, people listened. Now when the Pope speaks, people either laugh at him or ignore him, and this includes most Catholics nowadays. Then again, just how "Catholic" are these people anyway?

The Catholic Church is right. The secularists are indeed ruining everything for them. Worse yet, a fairly large number of Catholics are secularists. Can't murder people just for opposing you, just like in the good ol' days, thanks to the secularists. But then again, doesn't God want you to kill people? Wasn't that the old excuse in the old days when heretics were burned at the stake? Does this mean you are now ignoring God, and making God's law subservient to secular law? Does this mean that even the Pope is a secularist? Or has God become weaker? Maybe God changed his mind?

How come no one ever answers these questions?
 
The Catholic church has only made ex cathedra statements twice: The Assumption of Mary (she floated up to Heaven at the end of her life) and the Immaculate Conception (of Mary, not Jesus, where she was born without sin, as if she had been baptized already).

That the church runs around slobbering ex cathedra everywhere is an old Protestant bugaboo.
 
Beerina said:
The Catholic church has only made ex cathedra statements twice: The Assumption of Mary (she floated up to Heaven at the end of her life) and the Immaculate Conception (of Mary, not Jesus, where she was born without sin, as if she had been baptized already).

That the church runs around slobbering ex cathedra everywhere is an old Protestant bugaboo.
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No it's not, more's the pity! The infallibility in general of pontifical pronouncements is repeatedly asserted, and it often contaminates discourse within that church. It was copiously invoked in relation to the disastrous encyclical Humanae Vitae. See for example http://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/AUTHUMVT.HTM
In the first place, let us point out that, according to the teaching of the last council, the doctrinal authority of the Pope and the Bishops is not limited to infallible teaching. The duty of obedience is not restricted to definitions of faith: "That religious assent of mind and will is due in a very singular way to the authentic Magisterium of the Sovereign Pontiff, even when he does not speak ex cathedra: this implies the respectful acknowledgement of his supreme teaching authority and the earnest adherence to his statements, in conformity with his manifest thought and desires, as well as with the deductions possible, especially because of the nature of the document or the frequent repetition of the same doctrine or the mode of expression".
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Beerina said:
That the church runs around slobbering ex cathedra everywhere is an old Protestant bugaboo.
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When in 1905 France adopted a law providing for the separation of Church and State, Pope Saint Pius X hit back with an Encyclical Vehementer Nos in which he slobbered the following astonishing statement regarding the authority of the leaders of the Church:
8. For the provisions of the new law are contrary to the constitution on which the Church was founded by Jesus Christ. The Scripture teaches us, and the tradition of the Fathers confirms the teaching, that the Church is the mystical body of Christ, ruled by the Pastors and Doctors (I Ephes. iv. II sqq.) - a society of men containing within its own fold chiefs who have full and perfect powers for ruling, teaching and judging ... It follows that the Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.
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(My bold.) Looks like infallibility to me, whatever name they choose to give it.
 
Beerina said:
The Catholic church has only made ex cathedra statements twice: The Assumption of Mary (she floated up to Heaven at the end of her life) and the Immaculate Conception (of Mary, not Jesus, where she was born without sin, as if she had been baptized already).

That the church runs around slobbering ex cathedra everywhere is an old Protestant bugaboo.
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Actually, that's wrong. There are only two official ex-cathedra pronouncements by the POPE -- well, if you ignore half a dozen more which do meet the requirements anyway -- but church councils can also be infallible, if they pronounce something as fundamentally incompatible with the Catholic faith or being saved.

But even leaving the issue of whether the Council Of Trent is infallible or not -- though I think it would open a can of worms by itself if the church were to admit that it was just a bunch of guys talking out the ass, as stuff from there is pretty important for the current dogma -- the issue still remains that Mary's immaculate conception is defined as, you know, being free of sin starting from conception. As opposed to others who aren't. The clue of it being about conception is, you know, right in the title of the doctrine. I don't think one can keep that as infallible, if they were to decide that a foetus doesn't actually have a soul right from conception.
 
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@Craig:
Indeed, they repeatedly maintain that they know better than the plebs, and it's meant to be so. However, infallibility goes one step further, and makes it absolute truth that even another pope or council can't change any more. The difference may seem subtle in the short run, but in the long run it's pretty massive. You can undo what pope X knew better than you, by having pope Y be even smarter than pope X and say it ain't so. But if it's infallible, then it's absolute truth handed down by God (as the Holy Spirit), and no pope can be smarter than God.

Basically if (as a hypothetical illustration) some medieval pope were to declare, dunno, that the Earth is flat and rests on four pillars, a later pope could still say some form of, "yeah, he was more informed and had better judgment than his flock, but nowadays we're even more informed and can say he was wrong." But if that were packed in an ex-cathedra pronouncement, that's it, you'd be stuck with it for ever.

It's the kind of stuff that is usually not a problem in the short run, but give it a few hundred years and an infallible pronouncement can bite you in the ass.
 
Craig B said:
When in 1905 France adopted a law providing for the separation of Church and State, Pope Saint Pius X hit back with an Encyclical Vehementer Nos in which he slobbered the following astonishing statement regarding the authority of the leaders of the Church: (My bold.) Looks like infallibility to me, whatever name they choose to give it.
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Wow. I've never read a more arrogant assertion of divine right than that!
 
Hans

True. However my point was that unthinking obedience to the Pope is enjoined even where ex-cathedra infallibility is not explicitly invoked. That monarchical centralism is the "Protestant bugaboo" that Beerina was deriding. In fact, concerns about this extend well beyond the ranks of Protestantism, and they are well founded. Uncritical assent to papal pronouncements does much harm, eg in the area of artificial birth control, and in other fields where compassion and good sense find themselves in conflict with religious sexual taboos.
 
Puppycow said:
Wow. I've never read a more arrogant assertion of divine right than that!
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The first time I saw it, I thought it was an anti-clerical hoax or spoof, and I had to look it up to convince myself that it was an authentic transcription of words addressed by a religious leader, now regarded as a Saint, to the citizens of one of the most advanced and civilised countries in the world at that time.
 
Puppycow said:
Wow. I've never read a more arrogant assertion of divine right than that!
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Craig B said:
Hans

True. However my point was that unthinking obedience to the Pope is enjoined even where ex-cathedra infallibility is not explicitly invoked. That monarchical centralism is the "Protestant bugaboo" that Beerina was deriding. In fact, concerns about this extend well beyond the ranks of Protestantism, and they are well founded. Uncritical assent to papal pronouncements does much harm, eg in the area of artificial birth control, and in other fields where compassion and good sense find themselves in conflict with religious sexual taboos.
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Craig B said:
The first time I saw it, I thought it was an anti-clerical hoax or spoof, and I had to look it up to convince myself that it was an authentic transcription of words addressed by a religious leader, now regarded as a Saint, to the citizens of one of the most advanced and civilised countries in the world at that time.
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I believe Gladstone put it well. After the First Vatican Council he stated that catholics had "forfeited their moral and mental freedom" and described the church as "an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism, and one dead level of religious subservience" and said the papacy wanted to impose its own arbitrary tyranny hiding these "crimes against liberty beneath a suffocating cloud of incense".
Interestingly Cardinal Newman responded by arguing that individual conscience, which he said was supreme, was not in conflict with papal infallibility.
 
catsmate1 said:
... Interestingly Cardinal Newman responded by arguing that individual conscience, which he said was supreme, was not in conflict with papal infallibility.
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Indeed not! Many Catholic teachers have a rather strange definition of what "conscience" means. Here is a modern disquisition on the topic.
A well-formed conscience has a voice that tells us how to conform our will to God’s will. God’s will is divine law, revealed to us through Scripture, tradition, and Holy Mother Church. Thus, a well-formed conscience is formed by study of the teachings of the Church. This is brought home by the U.S. bishops in "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship." Four sentences are given about forming consciences, while fourteen pages are dedicated to Catholic social teaching and its application to the issues facing voters.
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http://www.cuf.org/FamilyResources/conscienceformation.asp
 
There's a saying in politics that some organizations are looking outward for converts, while others are looking inward for heretics. The Vatican's in full heretic hunting mode.

I love this quote from the LA times:

The Vatican also said that although the conference was vocal on social justice issues, it had failed to speak out enough on other church concerns, such as opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.
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These guys wouldn't like Jesus as he is described in the Bible. That guy talked a lot about social justice issues, and never mentioned gay marriage or abortion.
 
Scott Haley said:
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I love this quote from the LA times:



These guys wouldn't like Jesus as he is described in the Bible. That guy talked a lot about social justice issues, and never mentioned gay marriage or abortion.
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" I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ"

Ghandi

Never a truer word spoken IMO.
 
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