Wosbald wrote: ↑04 Feb 2024, 00:09
+JMJ+
Del wrote: ↑03 Feb 2024, 21:45
Wosbald wrote: ↑02 Feb 2024, 16:14
Rather, I'd say that — at least in the final instance — we believe that we're safe from infiltration cuz no Pope, in the exercise of the Petrine Office, could ever be an "Enemy" of the Church. Full-Stop.
Why do you believe that?
Cuz that's the only way Catholicity has any existential coherence. Barring that, the practice-of-faith is a schizophrenic endeavor prey to insoluble contradictions.
But even trust in the promises of Christ and the guidance of the Holy Spirit can be taken to extremes beyond reason and experience.
We know that it is possible for more bishops teaching error than teaching truth, as happened during the Arian Heresy.
We know that popes and patriarchs can teach serious errors, such as Nestorius. Such errors are eventually corrected in Council by the Holy Spirit, but it's still tough for people living through it.
We know that popes can live and speak in ways and scandal that lead many Christians astray. I speak of the Avignon Papacy period, resulting in rival anti-popes and factions. And of Alexander IV, whose decadence a few decades before Luther set the stage for the scourge of the Protestant Revolt.
And mind you, we still have the biblical prophesy of the Great Apostasy in which many who should know better will be lead astray. We are certainly living in a period of great apostasy now. This might be the Big One.
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We have been blessed with five centuries of wise and holy Popes. The Holy Spirit has been generous to us.
But right now we have a Pope who is flirting with modernist errors -- tempting us to embrace divorce, homosexuality & drag queens, and Marxist social ideals. His treatment of Cardinal Burke, Bishop Strickland, and Catholics throughout the world who are devoted to the Latin Mass has been unwarranted and harsh.
This is tough to live through, but we have seen worse. We know that the Catholic Church will survive when everything else around us has failed.
Just don't be so naive as to think that God will not allow Satan to use our own pope as a club against us. It has happened before.