The Pope's legal creation of a kind of Anglican Rite within the Catholic Church is the kind of thing I have been hoping for for decades. Anglican usage deserves to be preserved, whatever happens to the Anglican Communion.
I have long forgiven the Holy Father what I thought at the time was his disastrous decision re the Lefebvrians - mainly because he gave such a good explanation of it. Now he is beginning to really sound like the Pope who will make our dreams come true. If only he would close down Medjugorje.
If the local bishop saying, "Hey, so, these supposed apparitions? Nothing actually going on! Hey, supposed-apparition-havers? Cut it out, guys!" isn't enough, what could the Pope do? :/
A lot, actually. And I think the fact that JPII never did anything to support his brother Bishops in Bosnia on this matter is the worst stain on his pontificate. (Don't get me wrong, I think he was a great Pope. But on Medjugorje he had a blind spot.)
Okay, take my question as not-rhetorical - what could he do? Obviously, when JPII said, "Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops, I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder," that didn't stop numerous Catholics from going "the Church should only talk about faith not my personal life"; a similar lack of results came out of "Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren, I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful." So just reiterating what the bishop said, or saying, "Hey, guys? Your bishop said something, you might want to listen to that," doesn't seem like it'll do anything.
I don't think the "visionaries" would care if they were put under any particular penalty, either, since they'd surely promptly have a vision of Mary rebuking the Pope.
The people who would care are the literally millions of decent but unschooled Catholics who are taken on bus or air tours to this place because, not following the details of church activity, they never heard of the local Bishp's condemnation. Would the Medjugorje conspiracy of noise and silence, the agreement between rebellious Franciscans, profiteering travel agents, and opportunistic locals, be enough to silence the voice of the Pope? I doubt it. Whatever else may be said of the condemnation of abortion and of JPII's intervention against female ordination, one thing is certain: everyone in the world knows that they happened. You cannot, as Medjugorje does, deceive people through ignorance. And we are talking about a different public: one doubts whether very many of the pretend Catholics who claim the right to murder their and others' babies would be deeply interested in Marian pilgrimage. Anyone who wishes to visit a Marian shrine (which is what Medjugorje claims to be) must be assumed to belong to the most traditional and most idiomatic kind of devout Catholic. Such persons would not treat the word of the Pope with contempt.
You're right - I forget that most Catholics probably don't even hear when their own bishops do something, much less a bishop in another country. It's not that I thought the Catholics on pilgrimage are indifferent or hostile to the two statements I quoted, but that if they'd ignore the local bishop, why wouldn't they ignore the Pope? But of course if they haven't heard, they aren't ignoring what he said, they're ignorant of it instead.
Because it is a case so perfect, so elaborately repulsive, so consistent and unchanging, of religious fraud, that it might as well have been scripted by a committee of the National Secular Society. It is a gross fraud, with nasty connections with the Croat side in the Yugoslav civil war, set up by a bunch of rebellious and immoral Franciscans who were about to be punished by their own bishop and were effectively excommunicated. The leading spirit among them had an irregular "wife". Because the "teachings" of the so-called virgin of Medjugorje are full of such screaming relativist and modernist heresy as that all the religions of the world are of equal value in her Son's eyes. Because some of the seers have decamped to Italy and America with considerable fortunes. That is right off the top of my own head, but I will find you links if you insist. And last and most important: the local bishops, one after the other, have consistently denied any validity to the "visions". The fact that they have been drowned out and ignored by a conspiracy of hysterical noise does not alter that.
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Date: 2009-10-20 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 02:25 am (UTC)(Granted I could avoid some of that if I didn't sleep in on the weekends.)
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Date: 2009-10-21 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 02:14 pm (UTC)I don't think the "visionaries" would care if they were put under any particular penalty, either, since they'd surely promptly have a vision of Mary rebuking the Pope.
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Date: 2009-10-21 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 08:32 pm (UTC)Just out of curiosity:
Date: 2009-10-21 11:03 am (UTC)Re: Just out of curiosity:
Date: 2009-10-21 11:18 am (UTC)