Pope Francis at the General Audience in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall, Feb. 2, 2022. / Daniel Ibañez/CNA
Denver Newsroom, Feb 3, 2022 / 17:20 pm (CNA).
Any talk about apostates and former Catholics who persecute the Church is bound to grab attention, and Pope Francis’ Wednesday audience drew a reaction from some who wondered whether he had intentionally included the damned in the communion of saints.
For all the controversy, the pope’s comments seem to reflect his personal emphasis on Catholic Christians’ links to the saints in heaven, but also to our loved ones and neighbors who are baptized but currently reject the faith.
“We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven, and on earth the saints, the sinners, all,” the pope said during his Feb. 2 general audience. During his catechesis, he emphasized that reliance on the intercession of a saint “only has value in relation to Christ.”
“Christ is the bond that unites us to him and to each other, and which has a specific name: this bond that unites us all, between ourselves and us with Christ, it is the ‘communion of saints’,” said the pope.
He cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which defines the communion of saints as “the Church.”
“What does this mean? That the Church is reserved for the perfect? No,” the pope added. “It means that it is the community of saved sinners.”
“No one can exclude themselves from the Church, we are all saved sinners. Our holiness is the fruit of God’s love manifested in Christ, who sanctifies us by loving us in our misery and saving us from it. Thanks always to him we form one single body, says St Paul, in which Jesus is the head and we are the members,” he said.
The image of the Church as the Body of Christ helps us understand what it means to be bound to one another in communion, the pontiff continued. This body can suffer together, or be glorified together.
Summarizing St. Paul, Pope Francis said: “we are all one body, all united through faith, through baptism… All in communion: united in communion with Jesus Christ. And this is the communion of saints.”
The joy and sorrow of each Christian’s life affects every other Christian, said the pope, and this has consequences for how Christians respond to each other.
“I cannot be indifferent to others, because we are all in one body, in communion,” he explained. “In this sense, even the sin of an individual person always affects everyone, and the love of each individual person affects everyone.”
By virtue of the communion of the saints, every Christian is bound to another in “a profound way,” he said, adding “this bond is so strong that it cannot be broken even by death.”
The communion of saints includes the dead, said the Pope.
“They too are in communion with us,” he said. “Let us consider, dear brothers and sisters, that in Christ no one can ever truly separate us from those we love because the bond is an existential bond, a strong bond that is in our very nature; only the manner of being together with one another then changes, but nothing and no one can break this bond.”
Pope Francis then raised an objection from a hypothetical speaker: “let’s think about those who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism: Are these also at home?”
The pope responded: “Yes, these too. All of them. The blasphemers, all of them. We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven, and on earth: the saints, the sinners, all.”
“In this sense, the relationship of friendship that I can build with a brother or sister beside me, I can also establish with a brother or sister in heaven,” he said, continuing to explain devotion to the saints.
The pope’s remarks about apostates, persecutors, and those who deny their baptism drew some reaction on the internet.
CNA sought comment from Father Roch Kereszty, a Cistercian monk and retired University of Dallas theology professor. He said that papal talks are in the genre of “a fatherly exhortation, not a binding document” and must always be interpreted in a Catholic context.
“Most of Wednesday’s talk is a beautiful meditation on the communion of the saints in which Pope Francis emphasizes so enthusiastically the baptismal bond’s strength that some of his statements can easily be misunderstood,” Kereszty said Feb. 3. “Aware of his many attestations that he is a son of the Church and teaches only what the Church teaches, I exclude an intention to contradict the Church’s faith.”
“Baptism imprints an indelible mark on the soul, called baptismal character, and if there is no opposition by the soul, it also results in sanctifying grace in virtue of which Christ lives in the soul and joins us to himself and to all Christians both on earth and heaven,” he continued. “By grave, mortal sin we lose sanctifying grace and thus the indwelling of Christ in the soul and, of course, the right to heaven. But no sinner, no matter how obstinate, can lose the indelible mark of the baptismal character.”
“Every mortal sin breaks the bond of love on the part of the sinner, but it does not delete the character,” Kereszty said.
“The Pope quoted the Catechism: ‘The communion of the saints is the Church.’ Yes, but the living members of the Church are those in a state of sanctifying grace,” the priest added. “Those baptized members in a state of mortal sin are dead members, but the prayers of the Church are surrounding them with the love of a grieving mother. They will be saved only if they repent.”
“So it seems that when the pope speaks of the baptismal bond he does not distinguish between the character of baptism which one cannot lose, but which does not in itself save, and the bond of love which saves because it assures Christ’s presence in the soul,” Kereszty explained. “But this bond of love is destroyed by mortal sin on the part of the sinner. The Church, by her prayers, however, tries to obtain the grace of repentance for the sinner. And the baptismal character in the sinner may work in his heart to obtain his conversion.”
Asked about baptism and hell, Kereszty said, “the Communion of Saints and the baptismal bond does not include those in hell. One should speak about hell, but not necessarily in the same talk.”
Pope Francis does not particularly focus on hell in his preaching, but he has referred to hell and God’s judgement in the past.
In Nov. 22, 2016 remarks during a morning meditation at his residence the Casa Santa Marta, he reminded his audience of “(the) call from the Lord to think seriously about the end: about my end, the judgement, about my judgement.”
The pope remarked that children traditionally learn the “four last things” from the Catechism, namely “death, judgement, hell or glory.”
While some might say “Father, this frightens us,” Pope Francis said, he answered: “It is the truth. Because if you do not take care of your heart… (and) you always live far away from the Lord, perhaps there is the danger, the danger of continuing in this way, far away from the Lord for eternity. This is very bad!”
“Today it will be good for us to think about this: what will my end be like? How will it be when I find myself before the Lord?” the pope said.
He recounted Christ’s words from the Book of Revelation: “Be thou faithful unto death… and I will give you the crown of life.”
“Fidelity to the Lord: this does not disappoint,” he said in 2016. “If each one of us is faithful to the Lord, when our death comes, as shall we say what St. Francis said: ‘Sister death, come’. It will not frighten us.”
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“Freedom is under threat in Europe.” He just noticed that? It’s under threat EVERYWHERE.
I’m sorry to be so sarcastic but with every passing day it becomes increasingly difficult for me to take this man seriously.
Sarcasm is likely the most polite response possible, especially in reply to one who is very much at the heart of the problem.
“This is the dangerous persecution of modernity that advances consumerism,”
This is the most nonsensical statement ever made by any human being in human history. An evil result “persecutes” a presumed good, subsequently described as an evil for promoting the evil that gave rise to the evil that performed the persecution in the first place.
Francis refuses to understand how evil exists in the human experience because his ego is so consumed with ignoring how the moral absolutes he often trivializes despite their origins from the mind of God. He is a secular elitist at heart and believes the world’s progressives can engineer evil out of existence with enough attacks on impersonal forces requiring structural reforms rather than personal redemptive actions.
May the Almighty have mercy on us. I’ll pray today for unity in the Church from one of the seven images of Fatima’s Madonna, in Venice.
Conversion is an ongoing and a never-ending opportunity. “Democracy is not a state in which people act like sheep” – Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi
Contemplating the rising storm clouds in 1940, the Anglo-Catholic T.S. Eliot already mourned over the loss of freedom–and truth–across what had once been Christendom. He made some initial proposals for a “Community of Christians” buoyed in part of Education. He wrote:
“[in this essay] I was less concerned with the more superficial, through important differences between the regimens of different nations [Britain contrasted with Germany and Russia], than with the more profound differences between pagan and Christian society [….]
“To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion [….]
“It is not enthusiasm [he cites a flicker of Anglican “revivalism” in 1938], but dogma [!], that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society” (“The Idea of a Christian Society,” 1940).
In our now more septic state of paganism, wondering here if progressive and big-tent Synodality in 2023 (where even rudimentary sexual morality is up for grabs) will even try to catch up with Eliot in 1940?
I suppose we need to credit Pope Francis for finally recognizing that freedom is under threat in Europe (and not just there!) He does need to investigate the source a little more rigorously. It comes not from some abstract consumerism, however evil and empty that theory is. Rather it originates from the ideas and actions of his friends and allies in the EU, the Democrat Party, the international banking cartels, the tech and pharmaceutical industries, and other pillars of the Great Reset for which he serves as chaplain.
So this explains a lot! You know how Bergoglio always seems to be trying to destroy the Church?
That’s not what he’s doing at all!
He’s just trying to give Catholics enough adversity to shake us out of our lethargy!
Makes perfect sense!
LOL!
Is consumerism to blame for the unbelievable new “hate speech” law in Ireland? Try harder, Holy Father!
Materialism/consumerism is responsible for Ireland losing its Catholic soul & it set the stage for outside interests to successfully lobby for the acceptance of feticide, homosexual unions, & the rest of it. “Hate” laws are just the next chapter.
Sadly, the Protestant North has held on to their traditional views on family & marriage a whole lot better than the Catholic South has. I never thought I’d be praising Ian Paisley, but that sort of stubbornness has its virtues.
Well, yes, I can sort of see the progression of regressions you delineate here, although consumerism by itself did not bring Ireland or us to this unhappy place. A large dose of cultural Marxism it its many versions – feminism, multiculturalism, critical race theory and others – was added to the mix to make that happen. I will grant that consumerism helped to weaken resistance to this posion.
Freedom is realized in the exercise of our human rights, faith, family, sufficient and secure living conditions. Pope Francis’ policy on migration, largely from Muslim Africa and the Near East, described by Vat Secy of State Card Parolin to Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni as, Welcome, Protection, Promotion and Integration – are antithetical to those rights. As they are to the rights of Americans with Pres Biden’s open border policy promoted by our USCCB in fealty to Pope Francis. The open border EU policy and the Biden administration’s policy is highly favored by Francis and actually defines his definition of Modernism.
Giorgia Meloni is strongly opposed to this policy which puts her at odds with Vatican policy. She argues we’re stripping Africa of its geological resources and leaving little in terms of development, while simultaneously stripping Africa of its vital human resources, causing irreparable damage to migrants exploited by Mafia, [in America by the Mexican drug cartels] unable, unwilling to integrate, hostile to Christianity [actually polls indicate most S American migrants renounce their Catholicism].
If the Vatican were prepared to alleviate the human misery of world migration Pope Francis should use his influence with his friends George Soros, Bill Gates to foster investment in the impoverished, exploited areas of Africa and the Near East. Then ‘consumerism’ might become a blessing for those peoples.
It’s true that Latin American immigrants are increasingly non Catholic but many are Pentecostal rather than non believers.
From this man, a hymn to freedom rings hollow.