Zenit reports the Pope’s final homily on his Portugal trip:
All People Await Jesus, Says Benedict XVI
Urges Continual Proposal of Gospel, Without ImposingPORTO, Portugal, MAY 14, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Everyone is waiting for Jesus, even those who don’t realize it, says Benedict XVI.
The Pope stated this today in a Mass celebrated in Porto’s Avenida de los Aliados, in front of the municipal palace, with the participation of 120,000 faithful. Today is the final day of his apostolic trip to Portugal.
“My brothers and sisters,” he said, “you need to become witnesses with me to the resurrection of Jesus.”
The “indispensable mission of every ecclesial community” is “to receive from God and to offer to the world the Risen Christ, so that every situation of weakness and of death may be transformed, through the Holy Spirit, into an opportunity for growth and life,” the Pontiff said.
“And everyone, in the end, asks this of us, even those who seem not to,” he affirmed. “From personal and communal experience, we know well that it is Jesus whom everyone awaits.”
“We impose nothing, yet we propose ceaselessly,” the Holy Father stated.
That’s what we do here at Sentire Cum Ecclesia, Holy Father!
strike me lucky but if i had not seen the name benedict XVI next to this statement I thought it was said by a Wesley or a Booth or a Luther!!!!
Exactly, Matthias. We have what the Reformation dreamed of: an evangelical Pope!
Yes exactly. You have your Protestantism, and get to call it Catholic too.
Exactly what the old joke after the Council was too — we could have saved a lot of time to just issue three words, “Luther was right”, and go home.
Exactly what my dad meant in saying the RCC had become just another Protestant church like the one he converted from but with a pope.
Must be a very pleasant fantasy in which to indulge, a better form of Protestantism than you found in Protestantism itself.
No wonder the RCC’s “dialogue partners” are those churches which have similarly reinvented themselves, abandoning their historic confession — the members of the LWF, the Anglican Communion, to name but two — and signing travesties like the JDDJ, more aptly the Joint Betrayal of the Doctrine of Justification, recognised as such by those in all churches which hold to their traditional faith rather than a reinvention thereof.
No Catholic would or can ever say they have what the Reformation dreamed of. An evangelical — Gospel proclaiming — pope did not finally happen if you’re a Catholic; every single one of them has been, some better than others, but the Rock which is Peter has never, even in the worst of them, not been evangelical; the problem has been rather that once valid moral complaints spilled over into doctrine, what is truly evangelical was lost in the “evangelical” churches which had separated themselves from any right understanding like branches severed from a trunk.
If one recognises in a church what the Reformation dreamed of, what one is recognising is not the Catholic Church. And if that recognition is of something that actually exists, it proves the church in which it is recognised is not the Catholic Church but a Protestant one defined by Protestant norms.
For a Catholic, the Catholic Church has never not been evangelical, rather, what is evangelical has been mutated into something else once separated from the Catholic Church. And if the Catholic Church now corresponds to the dreams of that mutation, it is no longer the Catholic Church.
Which is why, if I were and when I was a Catholic, I find Brian, Hans and the rest considerably more tolerable than the neither-fisch-nor-fowl revisionism promoted as “Catholicism” here, having no basis in Catholicism, Vatican II, or for that matter, Protestantism, or anything else but the revisionism afoot in liberals of many denominations which culminated in the 1960s and decades later tries to find a proper mitre to cap itself.
Thanks be to God I found that Luther was indeed right. Which is why I am Lutheran — a miserable term Luther himself did not want, as the doctrine was not his nor did he die for anyone, just as he said, and just as Concordia says, Christian, not “Lutheran”, statements of faith containing what all Christians everywhere believe, explicitly by consistent ones, and implicitly by inconsistent and erring ones — and not Catholic or for that matter Protestant in the errors into which the “Reformation” drifted.
That faith, and not some 1960s Roman revisionism, is what the Lutheran Reformation dreamed of.
What was Martin Luther right about, PE? Was he wrong about anything? Just asking.
In the meantime, let us drop this tiresome argument about what is Catholic or what is Lutheran and just (as you suggest) ask ourselves what is authentically Christian.
What gives fuel to your double-dutch argumentation is that I have often said that I became a Catholic because I sought to be “truly Catholic”. Well, you have your definition of Catholic and I have mine.
Let’s simplify it and say that what I was seeking was the authentic Christian Church. I believe that in the Catholic Church I have found authentic Christianity. If this authentic Christianity is – in your view and by your defintion of the word “Catholic” – an inauthentic Catholicism, then it bothers me not two hoots.
Moreover, I believe that the Church must always seek to become MORE authentically Christian, and hence “semper purificanda” or (if you prefer) “semper reformanda”, by which I mean that I take the change which has occured in the Church in my stride, for I believe that it is (via many twists and turns) the change which the Holy Spirit wishes to work in the Church to make her more Christian.
Which is why your constant argument has no affect on me. When did Christ ever say that his Church had to be “real Catholicsm” (as defined by you and your experience)? Never as far as I know. It does have to be truly Christian.
Here and now, I bear witness to the fact that the Church in communion with the Bishop of Rome is truly Christian, and that I know of no better way of being truly Christian.
No I do not prefer “semper reformanda” as that expression originates with the “Second Reformation” to justify taking the church into error the opposite direction from Rome.
First you distinguish “Catholic” from “Christian”. And, typical of postconciliar apologetics, ascribe anything that does not agree with it to personal definition and experience — a nice tactic by which it dodges the emergence of this “Christianity” institutionally in the 1960s after a decades-long development from Romantic notions of some more authentic past to which they will now resource us.
The Catholic sees no difference between Catholic and Christian, even as the Catholic Church properly has no name.
Your distinctions are entirely liberal Protestantism, of the sort the Catholic Church once warned us against, before it became “Catholicism” itself.
Where do you think “my” definition and “my” experience came from, out my ass (or arse, if you prefer)? It came from the Roman Catholic Church, as some call it, and though I no longer believe it, is identifiable in the traditionalist movement hounded by the RCC unless it pays mediaeval fealty to the new Imperial religion, just as the pile you have bought from this postconciliar “Catholic Church” is indentifiable in the trends against which the Catholic Church warned me.
So on that score too I suggest you pay a little more heed to Brian et hoc genus omne, because while what that genus holds is dissent from Catholicism (read Christianity) too, at least it is honest and consistent about it and has at least something of a Catholic (ie Christian, if you’re Catholic) ring to it in continuity rather than this “revision of the revision” proffered as a “reform of the reform”.
PS re this propose/impose bullroar:
The novus ordo was proposed, never imposed, right.
The bishops of the Imperial administrative units known as dioceses were proposed, never imposed, right.
The parish priests were proposed, never imposed, right.
The “new translations” were proposed, not imposed, right.
Joseph Ratzinger as pope was proposed, not imposed, right.
Utterly laughable, were it not for the sad fact that it deludes many souls.
I think we are here talking about the appeal of the Word of God, Terry. We do not impose this word, but by giving it voice, “we make our appeal”, as St Paul said.
In the matter of governance (to which belongs all the situations of “imposition” you have listed) there will, of necessity, be “imposition”. This is true no matter how the Church is governed – even were it to be (God save us) governed democratically, as can be seen in the recent and lamentable situation of the ELCA recently. However, it must be said that the Church is a voluntary society, and you can opt out any time you like.
I can opt out any time I like?
Really. Wherever, as a Catholic, did you get that idea?
By Catholic lights, I am not saved by my Lutheran faith, but by such elements of the Catholic faith which can exist outside of the formal visible boundaries of the Catholic Church, and by which I am united to it in an imperfect and invisible way, therefore not extra ecclesia.
As are bishops in their dioceses and priests in the parishes charged with the care of all souls in their boundaries, not just Catholics, since it is to the church (read, of course, Catholic Church) that all men intend and properly belong.
Doesn’t sound like an opt-out to me. More like a criminal gang which has staked out its territory, and out of which, once in, one never gets.
Too bad I’m only latae sententiae, if that. I would wear excommunication from the RCC as a badge of honour.
By Catholic lights, I am not saved by my Lutheran faith, but by such elements of the Catholic faith which can exist outside of the formal visible boundaries of the Catholic Church
And by Lutheran lights, I am not saved by my Catholic faith, but by such elements of Lutheranism to which I still hold despite being Catholic. Yes, I know you wouldn’t put it that way, but it is the same thing. You would want to say, “No, you are saved through faith alone”, but it amounts to the same thing. That is a Lutheran doctrine.
It must be daylight out there right now, PE. Go and find something else to do, and stop wasting time in front of the computer.
Actually, at the time you wrote that comment, it was well past what ought to be my bedtime and quite dark here.
Apparently your earthly calculations are as off as your ecclesiastical ones.
Typical for the type of argumentation this postconciliar “Catholicism” uses — the ad hominem by which what anyone who disagrees does so out of nothing more than the disruptions of their own experience, then the sleights of hand by which what one didn’t say becomes what one did.
And lately, having actual credentials in an area becomes a liability, and now here Justification, the doctrine on which Christianity stands or falls, becomes a “Lutheran” doctrine as opposed to the “Christian” doctrine with no reference to whether it is Catholic or not though Catholic sees no difference between Christian and Catholic, coming from a recent enunciation rejected by traditional believers Catholic and Lutheran alike.
And now an invitation to just go away.