Is the Pope Catholic?

 

A Catholic friend sends me this link, Pope Francis complaining about “reactionary American Catholics who oppose church reform.” He asks for my response.

My response is that Pope Francis is a heretic. He speaks of the “evolution” of the faith, “church teaching evolving over time,” and of “backwardism.” “True doctrine always develops and bears fruit.”

This is the heresy of modernism, which Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies.” In a nutshell, that, as Justin Trudeau put it when asked why he insisted on half his cabinet being women, “this is 2015.” As if a date on the calendar made a difference.

Truth does not change with time. An evil deed does not become a good deed through the passage of time. Therefore, Catholic teachings on faith and morals, the “deposit of faith,” cannot change; they cannot “evolve.” They can only b elucidated, perhaps to apply to new circumstances. Just as in an Act of Contrition, the Ten Commandments are applied to one’s individual circumstances.

Pope Francis gives examples of Catholic morals supposedly changing over time.

"Today it is a sin to possess atomic bombs; the death penalty is a sin, it cannot can be practiced, and it was not so before. As for slavery, some pontiffs before me have tolerated it, but things are different today."

It could not have been declared to be a sin to possess atomic bombs before there were atomic bombs; but it is not a sin to possess atomic bombs. It would be a sin to detonate one over a city.

Tolerating slavery is not the same as declaring it moral. Politics is the art of the possible. The Catholic Church is obliged to tolerate many things it thinks are sinful.

The death penalty, it has become illicit due to applying s consistent ethics to changing circumstances. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.” The death penalty was once justifiable to preserve public order when there was no prison system, and less effective law enforcement.

Francis especially has in his sights “the so-called 'sin of the flesh',” which he accuses traditionalists of having under a magnifying glass.

But it is not traditionalists who chose this focus. It is the modernists, who as of the 1950s began scorning sexual sins as “conventional morality,” and preaching, “if it feels good, do it.” It is the modernists who chose this battle, on this ground.

One might, by construing Francis’s words in a very careful, lawyerly way, avoid the charge of heresy. 

I do not accept that. It is his duty, as pontiff, to be a reliable shepherd. Even if he is just obscuring the matter, he is doing Satan’s work. He seem to be consistently obscuring, at best, the correct teaching. Surely he is not so stupid as to be consistently doing this by mistake. He believes the heresy; or, rather, he wants to promote it.