Pope Francis addresses young adults gathered in Tirana, Albania, for the Mediterranean Encounters 2024 conference on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (Credit: The Archdiocese of Tiranë–Durrës)
Rome Newsroom, Sep 17, 2024 / 10:50 am (CNA).
Pope Francis praised cultural and religious diversity as “a gift from God” in a video message to an interreligious youth conference on Tuesday.
“Contemplate the diversity of your traditions as a wealth, a wealth willed by God,” the pope told young adults gathered in Tirana, Albania, for the Mediterranean Encounters 2024.
“Unity is not uniformity,” he added, “and the diversity of our cultural and religious identities is a gift from God.”
Francis’ comment about diverse religious identities being a gift willed by God followed shortly after the pontiff made headlines over the weekend for telling young people in Singapore on Sept. 13 that “all religions are path[ways] to reach God.”
The pope’s video message Sept. 17 was sent to 50 young adults from 25 Mediterranean and Black Sea countries participating in Mediterranean Encounters 2024 (Med24) in Tirana, Albania, Sept. 15–21.
Young adults gather in Tirana, Albania, for the Mediterranean Encounters 2024 on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. Credit: The Archdiocese of Tiranë–Durrës
The meeting’s theme is “Pilgrims of Hope, Builders of Peace” and comes one year after Pope Francis participated in the Mediterranean Encounters in Marseille, France, on Sept. 23, 2023.
The interreligious conference is focused on the themes of peace, migration, and human dignity and includes moments of dialogue, prayer, and cultural visits.
In his message, Pope Francis asked Med24 participants to “put the voices of those who are not heard at the center,” especially the poor and migrants.
“I think of those who, often very young, must leave their country for a better future,” he said. “Take care of each one. It is not about numbers but about people, and each person is sacred; it is about faces, whose dignity must be promoted and protected. We renounce the culture of fear to open the door of welcome and friendship.”
The pontiff also encouraged the young adults from Albania in particular to “walk in the footsteps of your martyrs.”
“Their courage is a living testimony that can inspire your commitment to resist all the violence that disfigures our humanity, as Blessed Maria Tuci did at only 22 years of age,” he said.
Maria (also spelled Marije) Tuci is one of 38 Albanese martyrs beatified in 2016.
The young Albanian woman, a teacher in a Catholic elementary school who was also in formation to become a religious sister, was arrested and imprisoned by the anti-Catholic communist state in 1949.
She died in 1950 at the age of 22 after being brutally tortured in prison.
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Thirty-four new Swiss Guards were sworn in Thursday in an elaborate ceremony in Vatican City in which the guards promised to protect the pope, even “sacrificing if necessary also my own life.”
Gian Andrea Bossi, a 20-year-old from Davos, Switzerland, was among the new Swiss Guards to take the oath on May 6.
“It is a great honor for me, for all of us. … We’ve prepared for weeks, for months for this day,” Bossi told EWTN News.
“I’ve always wanted to serve God in a way, and I wanted to serve the Catholic Church,” he said.
Gian Andrea Bossi, a 20-year-old Swiss Guard who was sworn-in on May 6, 2021. / Colm Flynn/EWTN News.
The swearing-in ceremony for one of the world’s oldest standing armies took place on the 494th anniversary of the Sack of Rome, the battle on May 6, 1527, in which 147 Swiss Guards lost their lives defending Pope Clement VII from mutinous troops of the Holy Roman Empire.
The ceremony began with three Swiss Guards blowing trumpets from the loggia, and then the guards marched to the sound of drums in a solemn procession.
Due to coronavirus restrictions, only the families of the guards and the press were allowed to attend the ceremony held in Vatican City’s San Damaso Courtyard. In 2020, at least 13 Swiss Guards tested positive for COVID-19.
As part of the schedule this year, the family members of the new guards prayed Vespers on the evening of May 5 in the church of Santa Maria della Pieta in the Vatican’s Teutonic College. Later, the “deposition of the crown” ceremony took place in commemoration of the guards who died during the Sack of Rome.
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin also offered Mass with the Swiss Guards in St. Peter’s Basilica in the morning ahead of the swearing-in ceremony.
Swiss Guards attend Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica on May 6, 2021. / Colm Flynn/EWTN News
Gérald Crettaz, the father of one of the new Swiss Guards, 23-year-old Baptiste Crettaz, said that he was very proud of his son for taking the oath.
“In our current world, where everyone is quite selfish and self-centered, my son is committed to something bigger, something wider that doesn’t belong to him, but to everyone. I think it is fantastic and it is so generous,” Crettaz said.
During the ceremony itself, each new recruit approached the flag of the Swiss Guard as his name was called out. Firmly grasping the banner with his left hand, the new guard raised his right hand and opened three fingers as a sign of his faith in the Holy Trinity.
While holding up his fingers, the guard said aloud: “I, (name), swear diligently and faithfully to abide by all that has just been read out to me, so grant me God and so help me his saints.”
In English, the full oath reads: “I swear I will faithfully, loyally and honorably serve the Supreme Pontiff Francis and his legitimate successors, and also dedicate myself to them with all my strength, sacrificing if necessary also my life to defend them. I assume this same commitment with regard to the Sacred College of Cardinals whenever the see is vacant. Furthermore, I promise to the Commanding Captain and my other superiors respect, fidelity, and obedience. This I swear! May God and our Holy Patrons assist me!”
Swiss Guards march into San Damaso Courtyard May 6, 2021. / Courtney Mares/CNA
Swiss Guards — known for their colorful striped Renaissance-era uniforms — are responsible for Vatican security together with the Vatican gendarmes. The Vatican military was established by Pope Julius II in 1506.
Candidates for the Pontifical Swiss Guard are required to meet strict requirements. Each recruit must be a Catholic unmarried male at least 5 feet, 8 inches tall and between the ages of 19 and 30. Swiss citizenship is required, as is a letter of good standing from the candidate’s parish priest.
“It is something that only we, Swiss people, can do, and it is important to show that there still are young people ready to be committed to promote some values,” Swiss Guard Baptiste Crettaz said.
“The fact that we are ready to give up our life for the Holy Father represents a strong meaning,” he said.
The Vatican approved an expansion of the size of the Pontifical Swiss Guards three years ago from 110 to 135 men. Despite the new recruits, it still remains the smallest army in the world.
“I am excited to see the Vatican, to get to know the pope … also to be closer to the Church, to the faith, to grow in the faith,” Bossi said.
“In the end it is to serve God, to serve the Church, to protect the faith and defend the pope,” he said.
Pope Francis received an audience with the new Swiss Guards in the Vatican Apostolic Palace ahead of the ceremony. The pope recalled that some former guards had discerned the priesthood after their service, while others went on to form their own family.
“I pray that those who begin their service now may also respond fully to Christ’s call, following him with faithful generosity,” he said.
“May these years that you will spend here be an occasion for a deepening of your faith and an even stronger love for the Church. I accompany you with my prayers and I thank you for choosing to make a few years of your life available to the Successor of Peter.”
Pope Francis, during his Angelus address on March 20, 2022, called on the world’s leaders to end the “abhorrent” war in Ukraine. / Vatican Media
Boston, Mass., Mar 20, 2022 / 08:34 am (CNA).
Jesus implores us not to blame God for misfortunes and points us instead to conversion as a solution to evils which oppress us, Pope Francis said Sunday.
“We must be careful: When evil oppresses us, we risk losing our clarity and, to find an easy answer to what we are unable to explain, we end up putting the blame on God,” Pope Francis said to crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his March 20 Angelus address. “And so often the very bad habit of using profanities comes from this.”
“How often we attribute to Him our woes and misfortunes in the world, to Him who instead leaves us always free and hence never intervenes imposing, but only proposing; He who never uses violence and instead suffers for us and with us,” he said.
Pope Francis’s comments included reflections on Sunday’s reading from the thirteenth Chapter in the Gospel of Luke.
In that reading, the pontiff said, Jesus “refuses and contests strongly the idea of blaming God for our evils: Those persons who were killed by Pilate and those who died when the tower collapsed on them were not any more at fault than others, and they were not victims of a ruthless and vindictive God, which does not exist!”
When bad things happen to us, we should not blame God, he said. Jesus tells us “we need to look inside ourselves,” he added. “It is sin that produces death; our selfishness can tear apart relationships; our wrong and violent choices can unleash evil.”
The Lord offers a “true solution,” Pope Francis said, which is “conversion.” Citing the Gospel reading, he said, “If you are not converted, [Jesus] says, you will all perish in the same way.”
God can never be the source of evil, he said, because, citing Psalm 103, God does not treat us according to our sins, but according to his mercy.
Mercy is God’s “style,” Pope Francis said. “He can’t treat us otherwise. He always treats us with mercy.”
Pope Francis offered an invitation to “turn from evil,” to “renounce the sin that seduces us,” and to “open” ourselves to the “logic of the Gospel.”
Where “love and fraternity reign, evil has no more power,” he said.
Pope Francis said that converting is not easy and Jesus knows this. Jesus wants to help in this conversion, he added.
Jesus knows that, oftentimes, “people repeat the same mistakes and the same sins,” and that can bring discouragement,” Pope Francis said.
“Sometimes our commitment to do good can seem useless in a world where evil seems to rule,” he added.
But Jesus encourages us by telling a parable that shows God’s patience, he said. Jesus “offers the consoling image of [a] fig tree that does not bear fruit during the accorded season, but it is not cut down. Jesus “gives it more time, another possibility,” the pope observed.
Pope Francis told the crowd that he enjoys “thinking that a nice name for God could be ‘the God of another possibility’: God always gives us another opportunity, always, always.”
God does not “cut us out of his love” nor does he “lose heart or tire of offering us again His trust with tenderness,” he said. “God believes in us! God trusts us and accompanies us with patience, the patience of God with us. He does not get discouraged, but always instills hope in us.”
Pope Francis said that “God is Father” and “looks after you like a father,” while noting that God does not look at the “achievements you have not yet reached” but rather “encourages your potential.”
“He does not dwell on your past, but confidently bets on your future,” he said. “This is because God is close to us.”
The Vatican announced the erection of the Weifang diocese on Jan. 29, 2024, the day of the consecration of the diocese’s first bishop, Bishop Anthony Sun Venjun. / Credit: Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association
In pre-colonial and village India the Muslims and Hindus often worshiped in the same temples, but on different days. And, so, it came to pass that the entire world became such a village—a global village.
And all was friendship as in the Garden. The diversity of the Areopagus again worked just fine, as did the pagan Kaaba with its multiplicity of 360 deities, one for each day of the year, or Hinduism with (it is said) its 300 million, or the West with the diversity of worshiping private choice in all things large and small.
And, the followers of Christ, and other religions, found their places once again as millets within a new Ottoman Empire. Or, as they had earlier, by paying into an annual protection racket to persist as encysted dhimmis within the exclusive ummah of Islam—-where there is no doctrine of original sin, and no redemption, and with a totally inscrutable Allah not even the elementary philosophical principle of non-contradiction.
And, so, “identity” religion resonated with the omnivorous ideology of “identity politics,” and even LGBTQ identity and religion…and in the global village they all lived happily ever after with the redefinition of even the inborn and universal natural law.
A deep sleep fell upon the leveled landscape, and even in the halls of the equally-leveled dicasteries of the apostolic Church. And, there was the twilight of universal fraternity, because no fire was cast upon the earth (Luke 12:41). And the world grew old as the Church grew old, with no memory of the successors of the Apostles nor of the backwardist twitchings of such as G.K. Chesterton who once, in a land far away, had said:
“Those runners [messengers of the Gospel] gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. . . .We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old” (The Everlasting Man).
You are a very confused man, who along with the current pope is spreading universal error throughout the world and especially amongst the young people. All religions are not equal in their approach to God. There is only ONE way and that is Jesus Christ, Who said; “I AM the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father, except by Me.” How dare you and this pope even compare Christianity with some ridiculous primative cult that worships images of beings with twenty eyes, fifty feet and two hundred arms. Are you and this pontiff insane? The answer is an obvious, YES. In the wake of all your nonsense, you are leading millions of innocent souls into confusion, error and darkness. Shame on you and your pope. Shame on you for not pointing the young to the TRUTH, which is Jesus Christ through the Old and New Covenants called the Bible or Sacred Scripture.
Be assured, Almighty God weeps, while Satan rejoices.
“A deep sleep fell upon the leveled landscape, and even in the halls of the equally-leveled dicasteries of the apostolic Church”.
Was it that the Church experienced its Rip Van Winkle moment due to the anesthetizing effect of free choice egalitarianism precipitated by the heady brew of the Kaaterskill Dutchmen Rahner, Kung, Kasper, Häring?
Now there you go again! (Reagan to Jimmy Carter). 44 years later, Now there you go again! (Catholics to His Holiness). I thought the whose religion is right and whose isn’t matter was done with. That all religions are not the same does that mean they’re all right? How’s that? Francis I says diversity is a gift from God [I hear alarm bells].
Although his praise of Albanian Catholic martyr Maria Tuci is warranted, why diversity? During the post WWII period Catholics, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox were severely persecuted by Marxist Enver Hoxha. Their deadly persecution deserves empathy and respect. Does that warrant praise for religious diversity? Clever these Forwardsts.
Bergoglio’s suggestion that the diversity of religions is a gift from God would have come as quite a surprise to the prophet Elijah, as we see in 1 Kings 18:40:
“Then Elijah said, ‘Capture the prophets of Baal! Don’t let any of them run away!’ The people captured all the prophets. Then Elijah led them down to the Kishon Valley, where he killed them.”
The takeaway, I guess, is that the Old Testament is archaic and backwardist. Like the Catholic Mass as it was said for the past 16 or 18 centuries.
If Freemasonry were running this “Magisterium” rather than Catholicism, what would change? If your answer is also “not one iota” then we have a deep problem.
Funny that you put it this way. When I was my diocese’s Director of Catholic Charities, I used to ask the staff: “If we took down our Catholic Charities sign and replaced it with one that said ‘United Way’, would anyone be able to detect a difference?”
When the Council was announced in January 1959 we were told that the Ecumenical Council would be a means of bringing protestants into the One True Church.
Were you there?
The fruits of the enterprise have proven tragically quite the opposite. Now we enjoy a Jesuit bishop of Rome who would see us provide credence to philosophical notions paraded as religions which have no reference to Jesus Christ.
We’ve been duped.
How specifically does the Buddhism road lead to God when Buddhists don’t believe in God? Just curious. Which of the millions of gods in Hinduism is the best representation of the God of the Bible? Just curious.
You need to read Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia’s THE DIVERSITY OF RELIGIONS or Mortimer Adler’s TRUTH IN RELIGION before you mislead others to their spiritual harm with such ignorant nonsense.
I was raised a Roman Catholic, was educated in Catholic schools, even as far as graduate school. It was good solid education. However, with the Second Vatican Council, I began to discern the direction that Catholicism was taking, with a watered down doctrine, a sterilized pulpit and a distancing from even the most fundamental of Tradition, to say nothing of Scripture. I deduced that the Church was headed in the direction of a One World Globalist Organization, and not the Apastolic True Church, supposedly founded by Christ. How sad!! I now refer to myself as simply, a lover of Jesus, a Christian ✝️
You need to return to the Catholic faith which has traditionally taught that outside it there is no salvation. You need to return to proclaim the truth to the apostates currently corrupting the faith. By leaving, you allow the Church to further weaken. As a result of your having left, the Church has been emboldened to further falsify the teachings of Christ, her founder. You need the Holy Bread of Life to sustain you, without which you have no life within you. Read John Chap. 6.
There’s nothing going on today that hasn’t happened in some similar form before. Bishops teaching heresy? Check out Arianism, and how many bishops avowed that. Pope teaching heresy? Check out Pope John XXII. Corrupt clergy?
The Vatican was called a pornocracy around 1000 AD, it was so bad. Bad sermons? Shortly before Vatican 2 there were widespread complaints about not having one at all. Unjust hierarchy, beating up good Catholics for being good Catholics? Check out St. John of the Cross, St. Joan of Arc, St. Athanasius, Padre Pio, Jerome Gracian.
As the Cardinal said to Napoleon, who threatened to destroy the Church: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.” The Church stands on the promises of God, not on the faithfulness of the clergy.
“Contemplate the diversity of your traditions as a wealth, a wealth willed by God…”
As long as the TRADITIONS don’t include the TRADITIONal Latin Mass.
A religion is the group of structures, conceptual and social, which grow out of a revelation of and by God of Himself and which expresses faith in God in the world.. There is only one authentic religious tradition — the Judeo-Christian tradition. All other entities claiming to be “religion” are philosophical constructs deriving from human reflection on existence in the world.
Bergoglio was claiming that manifest error is as worthy of assent as is the Truth. That is a clearly and plainly a falsehood within and without the parameter of theological analysis.
How the One True God, the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit confronts precisely any individual is unknown to us but we have been given principles on how that trasacts. How is God’s understanding, and mercy operative with any individual soul is not ours to know, but the final personal judgement of us all had best be faced with fear and trembling, and trust that the One True Supreme Being will always be just.
He cannot be otherwise because He is all good.
Islam rejects the revelation of Jesus Christ and seeks to obliterate it. 62,000 Christians have been martyred by Boko-Haram in Nigeria since the year 2000. The identity of “Allah” cannot be conflated with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob Who Is the Most Holy Trinity. Save me “they have respect of Jesus as a prophet.” Islam is the original fascist cult. It is all about power, subservience and mind control.
Buddhism allows for atheism [Theravada] or monotheism or polytheism [Mahayana].
Hinduism the same — more a spectrum of madness.
How would Bergoglio confront the polytheism the Apostles faced? Hail Caesar? Luva Aphrodite? Good goin Jupiter?
What utter stupidity. What impotent sentimentalism. Do we have Mr. Rodgers for a pope? Bergoglio doesn’t even rise to that level of cognitive engagement.
In pre-colonial and village India the Muslims and Hindus often worshiped in the same temples, but on different days. And, so, it came to pass that the entire world became such a village—a global village.
And all was friendship as in the Garden. The diversity of the Areopagus again worked just fine, as did the pagan Kaaba with its multiplicity of 360 deities, one for each day of the year, or Hinduism with (it is said) its 300 million, or the West with the diversity of worshiping private choice in all things large and small.
And, the followers of Christ, and other religions, found their places once again as millets within a new Ottoman Empire. Or, as they had earlier, by paying into an annual protection racket to persist as encysted dhimmis within the exclusive ummah of Islam—-where there is no doctrine of original sin, and no redemption, and with a totally inscrutable Allah not even the elementary philosophical principle of non-contradiction.
And, so, “identity” religion resonated with the omnivorous ideology of “identity politics,” and even LGBTQ identity and religion…and in the global village they all lived happily ever after with the redefinition of even the inborn and universal natural law.
A deep sleep fell upon the leveled landscape, and even in the halls of the equally-leveled dicasteries of the apostolic Church. And, there was the twilight of universal fraternity, because no fire was cast upon the earth (Luke 12:41). And the world grew old as the Church grew old, with no memory of the successors of the Apostles nor of the backwardist twitchings of such as G.K. Chesterton who once, in a land far away, had said:
“Those runners [messengers of the Gospel] gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. . . .We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old” (The Everlasting Man).
Has any man worshiping his own vanity ever second guessed what demons he might unleash?
You are a very confused man, who along with the current pope is spreading universal error throughout the world and especially amongst the young people. All religions are not equal in their approach to God. There is only ONE way and that is Jesus Christ, Who said; “I AM the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father, except by Me.” How dare you and this pope even compare Christianity with some ridiculous primative cult that worships images of beings with twenty eyes, fifty feet and two hundred arms. Are you and this pontiff insane? The answer is an obvious, YES. In the wake of all your nonsense, you are leading millions of innocent souls into confusion, error and darkness. Shame on you and your pope. Shame on you for not pointing the young to the TRUTH, which is Jesus Christ through the Old and New Covenants called the Bible or Sacred Scripture.
Be assured, Almighty God weeps, while Satan rejoices.
“A deep sleep fell upon the leveled landscape, and even in the halls of the equally-leveled dicasteries of the apostolic Church”.
Was it that the Church experienced its Rip Van Winkle moment due to the anesthetizing effect of free choice egalitarianism precipitated by the heady brew of the Kaaterskill Dutchmen Rahner, Kung, Kasper, Häring?
Now there you go again! (Reagan to Jimmy Carter). 44 years later, Now there you go again! (Catholics to His Holiness). I thought the whose religion is right and whose isn’t matter was done with. That all religions are not the same does that mean they’re all right? How’s that? Francis I says diversity is a gift from God [I hear alarm bells].
Although his praise of Albanian Catholic martyr Maria Tuci is warranted, why diversity? During the post WWII period Catholics, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox were severely persecuted by Marxist Enver Hoxha. Their deadly persecution deserves empathy and respect. Does that warrant praise for religious diversity? Clever these Forwardsts.
For an example of how other religions can lead to God see the sacrificial practices and cannibalism of the Aztec religion: see this review by a scholar and the native painting taken from the Codex Mendoza: https://www.thepostil.com/author/dario-fernandez-morera/
For other wonderful ecumenism see this interview, with an illustration of the slave market in Constantinople: https://www.thepostil.com/christian-slavery-under-islam-a-conversation-with-dario-fernandez-morera/
and this scholarly interview in Catholic World Report:
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/16/the-forgotten-history-of-christian-slavery-under-islam/
Will this man ever shut up?
Hmh.
Bergoglio’s suggestion that the diversity of religions is a gift from God would have come as quite a surprise to the prophet Elijah, as we see in 1 Kings 18:40:
“Then Elijah said, ‘Capture the prophets of Baal! Don’t let any of them run away!’ The people captured all the prophets. Then Elijah led them down to the Kishon Valley, where he killed them.”
The takeaway, I guess, is that the Old Testament is archaic and backwardist. Like the Catholic Mass as it was said for the past 16 or 18 centuries.
It would have come as a surprise to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
If Freemasonry were running this “Magisterium” rather than Catholicism, what would change? If your answer is also “not one iota” then we have a deep problem.
Funny that you put it this way. When I was my diocese’s Director of Catholic Charities, I used to ask the staff: “If we took down our Catholic Charities sign and replaced it with one that said ‘United Way’, would anyone be able to detect a difference?”
The Holy Father is in a confusion. He should be open to addressing it; but will he?
This is not what we were taught in Catholic schools even after Vat II.
Good grief.
The purpose of ecumenism is to bring others to Christ.
https://catholicism.org/g-k-chesterton-on-ecumenism-and-dying-of-broadmindedness.html
When the Council was announced in January 1959 we were told that the Ecumenical Council would be a means of bringing protestants into the One True Church.
Were you there?
The fruits of the enterprise have proven tragically quite the opposite. Now we enjoy a Jesuit bishop of Rome who would see us provide credence to philosophical notions paraded as religions which have no reference to Jesus Christ.
We’ve been duped.
Vat II was more like a Vacuum II.
Every road is a gift. All roads on God’s Holy Ground lead to the Divine. Praise be to the Provider of Roads.
Dr. Cajetan: How about the Road to Hell?
How specifically does the Buddhism road lead to God when Buddhists don’t believe in God? Just curious. Which of the millions of gods in Hinduism is the best representation of the God of the Bible? Just curious.
You need to read Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia’s THE DIVERSITY OF RELIGIONS or Mortimer Adler’s TRUTH IN RELIGION before you mislead others to their spiritual harm with such ignorant nonsense.
I was raised a Roman Catholic, was educated in Catholic schools, even as far as graduate school. It was good solid education. However, with the Second Vatican Council, I began to discern the direction that Catholicism was taking, with a watered down doctrine, a sterilized pulpit and a distancing from even the most fundamental of Tradition, to say nothing of Scripture. I deduced that the Church was headed in the direction of a One World Globalist Organization, and not the Apastolic True Church, supposedly founded by Christ. How sad!! I now refer to myself as simply, a lover of Jesus, a Christian ✝️
You need to return to the Catholic faith which has traditionally taught that outside it there is no salvation. You need to return to proclaim the truth to the apostates currently corrupting the faith. By leaving, you allow the Church to further weaken. As a result of your having left, the Church has been emboldened to further falsify the teachings of Christ, her founder. You need the Holy Bread of Life to sustain you, without which you have no life within you. Read John Chap. 6.
There’s nothing going on today that hasn’t happened in some similar form before. Bishops teaching heresy? Check out Arianism, and how many bishops avowed that. Pope teaching heresy? Check out Pope John XXII. Corrupt clergy?
The Vatican was called a pornocracy around 1000 AD, it was so bad. Bad sermons? Shortly before Vatican 2 there were widespread complaints about not having one at all. Unjust hierarchy, beating up good Catholics for being good Catholics? Check out St. John of the Cross, St. Joan of Arc, St. Athanasius, Padre Pio, Jerome Gracian.
As the Cardinal said to Napoleon, who threatened to destroy the Church: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.” The Church stands on the promises of God, not on the faithfulness of the clergy.
“Contemplate the diversity of your traditions as a wealth, a wealth willed by God…”
As long as the TRADITIONS don’t include the TRADITIONal Latin Mass.
A religion is the group of structures, conceptual and social, which grow out of a revelation of and by God of Himself and which expresses faith in God in the world.. There is only one authentic religious tradition — the Judeo-Christian tradition. All other entities claiming to be “religion” are philosophical constructs deriving from human reflection on existence in the world.
Bergoglio was claiming that manifest error is as worthy of assent as is the Truth. That is a clearly and plainly a falsehood within and without the parameter of theological analysis.
How the One True God, the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit confronts precisely any individual is unknown to us but we have been given principles on how that trasacts. How is God’s understanding, and mercy operative with any individual soul is not ours to know, but the final personal judgement of us all had best be faced with fear and trembling, and trust that the One True Supreme Being will always be just.
He cannot be otherwise because He is all good.
Islam rejects the revelation of Jesus Christ and seeks to obliterate it. 62,000 Christians have been martyred by Boko-Haram in Nigeria since the year 2000. The identity of “Allah” cannot be conflated with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob Who Is the Most Holy Trinity. Save me “they have respect of Jesus as a prophet.” Islam is the original fascist cult. It is all about power, subservience and mind control.
Buddhism allows for atheism [Theravada] or monotheism or polytheism [Mahayana].
Hinduism the same — more a spectrum of madness.
How would Bergoglio confront the polytheism the Apostles faced? Hail Caesar? Luva Aphrodite? Good goin Jupiter?
What utter stupidity. What impotent sentimentalism. Do we have Mr. Rodgers for a pope? Bergoglio doesn’t even rise to that level of cognitive engagement.