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Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.
You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like
As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.
It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.
So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.
Relatedly: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2023/11/pope-francis-as-public-heretic-evidence.html?m=1
It should be noted that rorate Caeli is very influential among right wing clergy and that the author is not simply a rando, but also that it’s unclear what his call would actually look like and that pope Francis is an 87 year old man with cancer and at least two previous heart attacks, while the opposition are likely very cautious because high ranking clerics in the RCC are almost definitionally old and high-IQ.
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Not again! You mean like 1054? or this entire list of breakaways before, during and after the Reformation?
I think this is just more rumblings on of the Spirit of Vatican II. A heavier hand should have been taken with the likes of the German bishops, but that's just my opinion. The main problem is the increasingly secular society of today, and the shockwaves of the abuse scandals - Ireland has become unrecognisable in social liberalisation during my lifetime, and that's something I've observed over a period of forty years since my late teens to today. Even those still going to Mass have a very vague notion of what the religion is about. There's a ton of cultural Catholicism, but even expressions of that like processions etc. got washed away very fast in the 90s onward.
So as far as doctrinal issues goes, there is the perennial problem of "how much accommodation to the Spirit of the Age do you do?" Benedict was my pope in a way Francis will never be, and I admired his attempts to go back to more reverent and more traditional liturgy and displays, but there is too much inertia and too much ignorance built up over the decades. We can't go back. Francis is very much imbued with the notion of pastoralism - that you go out and search for the lost sheep without worrying too much over the jots and tittles of what the rules precisely say. And he's having to deal with "how do you prevent the Church from being hollowed-out, from losing any young people continuing to remain Catholics, from becoming a museum piece where churches are just tourist attractions and not houses of worship?"
You can't go back, so how far do you go with the ways of today?
The other vision for the future of the church, that the Trads like to point out, is radical downsizing and refocusing around the core of conservative believers with a positive birthrate, instead of chasing wishy-washy modernists leaving the church for the religious experience of protesting anyway. While this would ensure slow-but-steady positive growth, it would also entail becoming a peripheral pseudo-ethnicity minority religion in many lands, like the Copts or Mormons. The only difference is their leader would still technically have an itty-bitty country to run.
This would also make the Pope less of an Important World Leader all the presidents shake hands with, and that the Church would have to sell a lot of its very nice things, a terrible fate in the minds of reformists (and many conservatives too, which is why they don't talk about those parts being necessary as much).
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