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.
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.
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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)