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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Pope Francis waves to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his Angelus address on Aug. 4, 2024. / Credit: Vatican Media
Rome Newsroom, Aug 4, 2024 / 10:03 am (CNA).
During his first Angelus address of the month, Pope Francis asked his listeners on Sunday to seek the path of charity, “which keeps nothing for itself but shares everything.”
“Material things do not give fullness to life. They are important but they do not fill life. Only love can do that,” the Holy Father said to crowds of local and international pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square on Aug. 4.
Reflecting on Sunday’s Gospel reading (John 6:24-35) — which recounts how many people followed Jesus because they were looking for bread to eat and not because they believed in him or his miracles — the pope challenged his listeners to ask themselves: “What kind of relationship do I have with material things? Am I a slave to them? Or do I use them freely as instruments to give and receive love?”
Alongside the virtue of charity, Pope Francis said gratitude and generosity are essential qualities that enable a Christian to grow in the love of God and others.
“Am I able to say thank you? Thank you to God and my brothers and sisters for the gifts I have received? And do I know how to share them with others?” he asked.
During his address, the pope also spoke about how a selfish and disordered attachment to money and material goods can be a source of conflict and division within families.
“How sad, on the other hand, when they [families] fight over inheritance. I’ve seen many cases of this. It’s sad,” he said. “For money, they don’t speak to each other for years!”
Pilgrims display Brazilian flags in St. Peter’s Square during Pope Francis’ Angelus address on Aug. 4, 2024. Credit: Vatican Media
With a prayer to Mary, the Holy Father petitioned the Mother of God “to teach us to make everything an instrument of love” for the good of others.
On Sunday the Holy Father asked pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square to pray for justice through the intercession of the newly beatified 18th-century Maronite historian Patriarch Estephan Douaihy and for the people suffering in Lebanon, the Holy Land, Palestine, and Israel due to violent conflict.
The pontiff also expressed his concern about the ongoing political unrest and protracted humanitarian crises occurring in Venezuela and Myanmar and asked for prayers for those who have recently died or are left homeless in India due to torrential rains and floods.
Before departing from the window in the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter’s Square from which the pope prays his Sunday Angelus with the public, he asked the crowds of waving and cheering pilgrims to pray for him.
“I continue to pray for you, please do the same for me. I wish you all a lovely Sunday, but please don’t forget to pray for me!” he said.
St. Peter’s Basilica / Simone Savoldi / Unsplash (CC0)
Rome Newsroom, Oct 2, 2022 / 03:00 am (CNA).
The world’s newest bishops gathered in Rome last month to learn more about what it means to be a Catholic bishop.
While the week’s presentations spanned a range of topics, three U.S. bishops who attended told CNA that synodality emerged as a key theme.
The Vatican’s annual formation course, sometimes known by the nickname “baby bishop school,” was canceled for two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic — making the 2022 edition the largest yet, with approximately 330 participating bishops across two sessions.
“People kind of picture baby bishop school as nuts and bolts, like ‘how to be a bishop.’ It’s not that at all,” Bishop Erik Pohlmeier of the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, told CNA at the end of the course.
“It’s kind of whatever the Church is talking about at that time, bringing that to the bishops that are coming on board,” he said. “The synodal process has been … a hallmark of conversation for the last couple of years, so now as we’re new bishops … the reflections revolved around that.”
The seminar’s first session was primarily attended by bishops consecrated in 2019 and 2020, while the second session was mostly those who joined the ranks in 2021 and the first part of 2022.
Thirty-nine U.S. bishops and auxiliary bishops attended, divided between the two weeks.
Pohlmeier was the freshest U.S. bishop to join. He was ordained a bishop on July 22 — just two days after his 51st birthday and seven weeks before arriving in Rome for the Sept. 12–19 course.
Speaking to CNA in Rome on Sept. 19, Pohlmeier said that as a new bishop, there are many things you do not know, but that’s where one’s fellow bishops come in.
“Every bishop knows other bishops,” he explained, like the bishop of the diocese where they served as a priest. “And they’re always, I mean to a person, helpful.”
Bishop Gregory Gordon, the first-ever auxiliary bishop of Las Vegas, Nevada, told CNA on Sept. 19 that the U.S. bishops’ conference also organizes meetings between bishops of the same ordination year, or “class,” as a way to build fraternity and create a network of support.
Bishop Gregory Gordon greets Pope Francis at the end of the course Sept. 19, 2022. Vatican Media
While the formal theme of this year’s seminar was how to announce the Gospel in changing times, Pohlmeier, Gordon, and Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria, Illinois, said the unofficial topic of the week was synodality.
What they talked about
“We’re in the midst of the synod,” Tylka, who attended the seminar Sept. 1–8, told CNA by phone from his diocese. So the course, he added, focused on questions such as: “What does it mean to be a synodal Church? What is the ministry of the bishop in relation to that?”
Care for the planet and one’s neighbor, themes important to Pope Francis’ pontificate, were also a major part of the seminar, Tylka said.
The week’s presentations also covered child protection and the sexual abuse crisis.
“That’s one of those things that I think we will take home, saying we will be very, very careful not to neglect,” Gordon said.
Some talks, Pohlmeier noted, were directly about synodality and what it means. At the same time, those of a more practical nature, such as canon law for bishops, “would always include some comment on the synodal approach.”
“You’re going to get different articulations of what that means depending on who you talk to, but in general, my understanding is that it is more of a listening posture,” the St. Augustine bishop said.
A bishop takes a photo of Pope Francis during their encounter on Sept. 19, 2022. Vatican Media
Bishop Gordon said Pope Francis himself modeled this listening attitude in their meeting with him on the final day of formation.
In the nearly two-hour meeting, he said most of the time was spent with the pope answering the bishops’ questions. “So you finished the course, [the pope] said. You’ve heard a lot already… Now I want to hear from you.”
This was Gordon’s big takeaway from the week: “It has to go back to the Holy Father’s words to us as he was answering our own questions, you know, asking us to exercise that episcopal closeness.”
The week also included time for communal prayer, Mass, adoration, and confession.
Bishop Tylka of Peoria said his personal opinion is that “a big part of synodality is the willingness and openness to create space for people to share their stories, to share their own encounters with Christ, to share their own experiences of how life is going.”
“So I think the role of the bishop clearly is to model that openness and that willingness to engage in dialogue,” he said.
This was my small group for discussion on Synodality! What an amazing group of bishops from around the world. Such a rich discussion on the Church! pic.twitter.com/fIOPLXwnfo
But there is also a lighter side to being a new bishop, as Pohlmeier evidenced with an amusing scene from the end of the week.
“Here we are, brand new and so … we got instructions on what we’re supposed to wear to meet the pope,” Pohlmeier said.
He explained that bishops in the Latin Church have two main styles of a full-length garment called a cassock. The new bishops were told to meet the pope. They should wear a black cassock with red trim, a purple fascia, and a purple zucchetto. (There is also a purple cassock with red trim for special liturgical events.)
Pohlmeier said it was funny to watch the bishops get ready for Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica and, afterward, the meeting with Pope Francis. Many of them were helping each other figure out where each piece of the complicated attire went — including the tall headpiece, called a mitre, which bishops wear to denote their office.
Today I joined the celebration in St Peter’s for the beatification of Blessed John Paul I. The rain did not dampen the joy of lifting up the ‘Smiling Pope.’ Humbled to be with the universal Church for such a celebration. pic.twitter.com/08AtzMUlMd
“Guys are literally opening up bags that haven’t been opened with miters from right there, from Euroclero,” Pohlmeier said, pointing over his shoulder in the direction of a clerical supply store next to St. Peter’s Square.
“You could see everybody that bought one this morning because they all matched,” he chuckled. “There were several people that were literally opening it up and pulling it out of the package and trying to get it on straight, and get things attached right, and not sure what clips go where and what’s right.”
“Those kinds of things are funny,” Pohlmeier said, “but nobody just tells you, ‘OK, buy this stuff, here’s what you need.’”
Bishop Mark O’Toole of Plymouth, England. / Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk
Vatican City, Apr 27, 2022 / 08:15 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Wednesday appointed Bishop Mark O’Toole to lead two Catholic dioceses in Wales.O’Toole, the 58-year-old bishop of… […]
25 Comments
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.