The Successors of Peter – “The identity of modern Catholics comes with our recognition of a legal jurisdiction. Catholics recognize a legal authority—the pope—under whose governance their religion is to be lived.” Something of a Scofflaw: On the Lawgiving Function of the Papacy (The Lamp)
Typing Prompts – ” In order to call themselves artists, the ‘AI artists’ need to adopt a definition of art so expansive that it includes any activity involving human decision-making.” I am not a paintbrush (Dappled Things)
Doctrinally Problematic Statements – “A pope’s first duty is to safeguard the deposit of faith and to pass it on undiluted.” Sick from Heresy: On Francis and Church doctrine (The Lamp)
The Latin American Church – “Fr. Clodovis M. Boff, OSM, was a leading figure in the development of liberation theology before emerging as one of its sharpest critics. In the letter that follows, he warns that the Latin American Church has been drifting in the last fifty years, leading to the worst crisis in its history.” An Open Letter to the Bishops of Latin America (First Things)
The Challenge of Islam – “The book successfully addresses topics including Islamic radicalism, antisemitism, and attempts to legally restrict criticism of Islam.” Review of Tim Dieppe’s “The Challenge of Islam” (Providence)
Multiverse of Analyses – “Suppressing disfavored ideas from consideration has serious consequences for the possibility of scientifically informed public discourse in our day.” New Vindication for the Regnerus Same-Sex Parenting Study (Public Discourse)
Christian Persecution in Nigeria – “In Nigeria’s Edo state, gunmen stormed Immaculate Conception Minor Seminary in the Diocese of Auchi the night of July 10, killing a security officer and abducting three seminarians, according to Aid to the Church in Need.” 1 Officer Dead, 3 Seminarians Kidnapped after Attack on Nigerian Seminary (Our Sunday Visitor)
Rejecting Gender Diversity – “The Catholic Women’s Federation (KFD) of Münster has called for an immediate stop to the planned awarding of the Josef Pieper Prize to U.S. Bishop Robert Barron on 27 July, describing it as a “devastating signal” that honours views which ‘devalue queer people and deny women the right to freedom of conscience’”. German Catholic Women’s Association demands Bishop Barron be stripped of Josef Pieper Prize (The Catholic Herald)
Suicide in Modern Catholic Literature – “Catholic writers can teach us a lot about suffering, suicide and hope. So that begs the question, can Catholic fiction literature potentially save lives? Dr. Martin Lockerd thinks it can.” Professor Shares What to Read When the World Feels Hopeless (University of St. Thomas Houston Online Newsroom)
Digital Missionaries – “For the first time in its history, the Catholic Church will celebrate a Jubilee event within a Holy Year specifically dedicated to digital missionaries and Catholic influencers, formally recognising the digital environment as a true field of mission.” The Church prepares its first Jubilee for Catholic influencers (Vatican News)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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#8 – Rejecting Gender Diversity – more nonsense from Germany, this time from the “Catholic” Women’s Association.
Doctrinally Problematic Statements – “A pope’s first duty is to safeguard the deposit of faith and to pass it on undiluted.” Sick from Heresy: On Francis and Church doctrine (The Lamp)
Feser gives it straight, sans histrionics. Aptly titled. He simply sums up the entire 12 years past as we watched, some with horror tinted by incredulity.
The man Frank defaced the Roman Catholic Church. May we soon recover.
Re: Sick From Heresy
The peerless Dr. Feser is admirably restrained — even gentle — in his takedown of Bergoglio’s stumblebum papacy.
Actually, as Dr. Feser demonstrates, the Bergoglio grotesquery was worse than merely stumblebum, since its shortcomings were so clearly intentional.
Dr. Feser examines several examples of Bergoglio’s egregious affronts to Christ and His teachings that, in ages past, when truth mattered, would have earned him the repudiation he so richly deserved.
We have been through a historically destructive and discouraging period in Church history, one that I I have termed the Bergoglian Captivity.
Dr. Feser has ensured that historians centuries hence who study this papal degradation will not require any heavy lifting as they assess the extent of the damage and assign the blame.
I recommend Dr. Feser’s brief, direct, easy-to-understand piece to any CWR readers who are still inclined to give Bergoglio the benefit of any doubt.
I’m talking to you popesplainers out there who habitually jump into CWR comment forums with your non-judgmental judgements about how loving and supportive the leftist Argentinian zealot prelate was thought to have been.
You know who you are.
Thank you, Lord, for salt!
WELL and TRULY said.
@ Digital Missionaries
One of Francis’ better angels must have suggested the idea of digital missionaries. Except it depends on the Gospel preached. If it’s Francis’ Todo Todo Todo and the spread of false mercy not good.
Layman Paolo Ruffini is the Francis appointed prefect. Ruffini, a known apologist for controversial documents. Fr James Martin SJ a consultor to the Dicastery. That taken into account ‘digital influencers’ has an unpleasant tone.
We already have several from fair to excellent Catholic websites. Pope Leo should give favorable account to the faithful influence the better websites have on the public domain here and abroad.
Should commenters expect attempts to be influenced by an army of programmed ‘digital influencers’? Perhaps a Ruffini Martin effort is already in place. Then, perhaps we already have or have the opportunity to re-influence the influencers.
Forgive my impertinence, Fr. Peter, but may I suggest that we dispense with Bergoglio’s vain inanity, “Todo, todo, todo.”
After all, Bergoglio’s Oz-like papacy is over.
We *are* in Kansas again.
The Successors of Peter – “The identity of modern Catholics comes with our recognition of a legal jurisdiction. Catholics recognize a legal authority—the pope—under whose governance their religion is to be lived.” Something of a Scofflaw: On the Lawgiving Function of the Papacy (The Lamp)
The author says, “…we turn to recent papal documents that are much less intellectually distinguished and controlled. Consider the page-by-page (two hundred fifty-six of them!) rambling ambiguity of Amoris laetitia. What is it, exactly, that we are being taught? What specifically are we now under an obligation to believe? I spent a futile afternoon, which I’ll never get back, trying to work this out. It is not only the authority that is obscure but the basic content. And that seems intentional. We are supposed to get with some general program, the essence of which is a careful avoidance of intellectual definition. Should Catholics ever bother with such a document? How many actually have?”
I was reminded of my experience teaching fifth-grade ‘faith formation’ in the late 1990s. My religious education director was partially bound in the fringes of the VCII’s dark spirit. She could recommend nothing much in the way of doctrinally pithy material, but she did suggest the newly minted, gladly welcomed, Catechism of the Catholic Church as a guide.
Yet the CCC didn’t always give clear and hard 1-line facts. Fifth-graders need a few concise ideas of Church teaching (on marriage or abortion, for example). I gleaned the CCC for grains, mustard seeds, kernels, wanting pith like that from a Baltimore Catechism. [Forget about finding clear 1-line statements in Gaudium et Spes or Lumen Gentium. That would be like looking for a mixed-wildflower bed in the strait-jacket gardens of Versailles. The analogy works better in obverse.]
The modern, verbose, loquacious, gluttonous masters of theology and hierarchy who write ‘magisterially’ today do seem intent on mixing traditional dogmatic, speculative, and heterodox theology. The result? Words in search of meaning and order.
The CCC was not written for 5th-graders. Neither was the Bible, if you haven’t noticed. If you find those too wordy and confusing, good luck with classics like CITY OF GOD by St. Augustine.
It’s a good thing that God has not left us with just the one-liners you want, which children would outgrow once they reached 6th grade.
Out,
Almost ¾ of US high school graduates achieve reading scores above basic but below proficient levels. Your comment exemplifies the student suffering from an inability to comprehend what he has read.
I think if you had tried you could have done better.
God bless your little heart.
@ Doctrinally Problematic Statements
“This was not an ex cathedra definition, so Honorius’s lapse is consistent with the conditions of papal infallibility” (Feser).
Feser is mistaken. Attempting to affirm the indefectibility of Roman pontiffs he misconstrues the error of Honorius I as an acceptable theological option. He says Christ’s possession of a human free will was never formally pronounced as doctrine. In fact that doctrine is included in the Nicaean Creed, Was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.
A man must have a will. A man is not simply an organism. If Jesus did not have a complete human nature including a will he would not be the Son of Man. He could not have become a man. He would confirm the Arian heresy as a body used by the divine Word. That the historical Jesus of Nazareth was not the Word of God.
The Council of Chalcedon 451 AD affirmed that Jesus Christ has two natures: one divine and one human, united in one person without confusion, change, division, or separation. This doctrine is known as the hypostatic union. The Council affirmed that Jesus is fully God and fully human. This is settled doctrine.
Feser’s argument for indefectibility would be better made in terms of formal pronouncement, since Honorius was judged guilty of heresy on the testimony of private letters, that fall under the juridical premise of private testimony, whereas a Roman pontiff acts privately as a person outside of the province of infallibility.
This occasion would tentatively hold similar for certain suggestions, statements repeated during the former pontificate that were considered erroneous regards settled doctrine. It raises the issue whether a Roman pontiff can be held responsible and sanctioned for language and actions outside of formal pronouncement that contradict perennial doctrine. The Third Council of Constantinople would confirm this.
@ The Successors of Peter
Author Thomas Pink notes the difference between the Church’s “magisterial teachings” and the “opinions of theologians”, plus the difference between both of these and “governance” actions the Church. But, not addressed in this article is that actual content of magisterial teachings and the different levels of this content…
As for the different levels of magisterial teachings (definitively revealed, or definitively proposed, or still requiring religious submission of the intellect)—recommended is Ad Tuendam Fidem (To Protect the Faith: by Which Certain Norms Are Inserted into the Code of Canon Law and into the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches) https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_jp-ii_motu-proprio_30061998_ad-tuendam-fidem.html Sections 5 thru 11 of an ATTACHED “Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fide,” (Ratzinger/Bertone, Pauline Books and Media, 1998) give definition:
ABOUT what is divinely revealed: “…the articles of faith in the Creed, the various Christological dogmas and the Marian dogmas; the doctrine of the institution of the sacraments by Christ and their efficacy with regard to grace; the doctrine of the real and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic celebration; the doctrine on the primacy and infallibility of the Roman Pontiff; the doctrine on the existence of original sin; the doctrine on the immorality of the spiritual soul and the immediate recompense after death; the absence of error in the inspired sacred texts; the doctrine on the grave immorality of direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being.”
ABOUT “truths connected with revelation by a logical necessity and to be held definitively,” e.g., that “priestly ordination is reserved only for men,” and which have been preserved by constant Tradition and now set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (Ordinatio Sacredotalis, 1994). Other examples are “the illicitness of euthanasia […], prostitution and of fornication.”
ABOUT “truths connected to revelation by historical necessity and which are to be held definitively, but are not able to be declared as divinely revealed”: “the legitimacy of the election of the Supreme Pontiff or of the celebration of an ecumenical council, the canonization of saints (‘dogmatic facts’), the declaration of Pope Leo XIII in the Apostolic Letter Apostolicae Curae on the invalidity of Anglican ordinations…”.
ABOUT other doctrines “set forth by the authentic Magisterium in a non-definitive way which require degrees of adherence differentiated according to the mind and the will manifested, this is shown especially by the nature of the documents, by the frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or by the tenor of the verbal expression.” [Counting low might be obscure signaling, implied carve-outs from the universal natural law, strategic silences, non-verbal photo-ops, and informal/ uncorrected interview summaries.]
On the Papacy. Pink’s focus on juridical governance as the defining feature of the papacy presents an overly narrow and institutional view that neglects essential dimensions of ecclesial life. By centering Catholic identity primarily on submission to papal jurisdiction, the vision risks reducing the Church to a legal structure rather than a communion of faith. This overlooks the renewed ecclesiology of communion and synodality emphasized in recent Church teaching, which recognizes the importance of shared discernment, collegiality, and the sensus fidelium in the Church’s life and mission. Synodality is not a threat to papal authority but a deeper expression of it, grounded in listening, dialogue, and co-responsibility among all the baptized. The limitation of the author’s approach lies in equating unity with centralized control, rather than with a dynamic communion animated by the Holy Spirit. This juridical reduction marginalizes the teaching and pastoral roles of the pope, as well as the contributions of local churches and episcopal conferences. A fuller theology of the papacy affirms that governance, teaching, and pastoral care are inseparable, and that authority in the Church must always be exercised in service to communion, truth, and mission, not merely through legal mechanisms, but through a synodal and sacramental vision of the Church.