REMARKS ON CARDINAL DEW'S REMARKS ON A ''REMARKABLE PAPACY'

Oops! In posting this as coming from the pen of Bishop Drennan, I made a mistake. Although it was included in +Drennan's April Diocesan Newsletter, this reflection was in fact written by Cardinal John Dew.

I apologise to readers for the mistake, as I have apologized to +Charles.

Nevertheless, the fact that these comments originated with the Cardinal gives them, of course, even more weight and renders them more serious. And presumably +Charles would not have given them prominence in his newsletter if he didn't concur.

"POPE FRANCIS’ FIRST FIVE YEARS OF REMARKABLE PAPACY"
– a reflection from Cardinal John Dew 

This Papacy is remarkable all right, and I want to remark on it, right now.

We have no obligation to make the theme of Pope Francis’ first five years "front and centre of our personal lives and in the life of the Church’" as Cardinal John Dew recently stated.

Instead of going "to the peripheries … of sin, of injustice, of pain, of ignorance and religious indifference";  Catholics imitating Christ live the Gospel right where they are, where God has placed them, rejoicing and giving  glory to God by faithfulness to Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis may have "moved towards a more collegial, synodal Church" but there’s no obligation for the rest of the Church to follow him. In fact, when the Pope contradicts Church teaching, the faithful have a duty to resist and repudiate.

The Church was founded by Jesus Christ specifically on Peter, not generally, on the apostles. The Pope always has the responsibility of shepherding not just priests, lay and religious, but also the bishops of the Church. That’s the way the Church normally operates. It’s only in the ecumenical councils that the bishops share responsibility with the Pope for the Church.

Yes, "we need to know ourselves as sinners and not to judge others". But often, when they impinge on our lives, we are called upon to judge not other people, but other people's actions. We need for example, to judge Pope Francis’ action in opening the possibility of Penance and Eucharist in "certain cases" to people living in an objective state of sin, in other words the divorced and 'remarried'.

That action is in direct contradiction of  the Congregation of the Faith’s statement in 1994, that for such people "reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception." 

The Church’s approved theologians all agree that not all decrees and statements by Popes and Councils are infallible. Mostly they engage only the Authentic Magisterium. If statements are made which are contrary to truths in the Deposit of Faith, Catholics are bound to disregard them. As the eminent  15^th century theologian Juan de Torquemada has said, " Should (the Pope) go against the universal customs of the Church, he need not be followed".

So I suggest that instead of moving towards another kind of Church we should all stay put in the one founded by Jesus Christ, trying to love God with "all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Mt 22, 37), "giving the assent of faith to all the doctrinal and moral truths defined by the Church’s Magisterium" (Fr Nicholas Jung).

That’s the only way we’ll ever achieve the "themes" of Pope Francis as summed up by Cardinal John. In other words, the Church should stick to its knitting.

- And really, is being called “a global leader” of a world that has gone, and continues to go on its broad and merry way, a compliment to Pope Francis?

Especially uncomplimentary to the Pope is the admiration of a woman like Helen Clark, whose pro-abortion sympathies are widely known and who once nominated an abortion certifying consultant (earning money for doing abortions) to the Abortion Supervisory Committee, in a glaringly obvious conflict of interest. 

Was that action sane? Clark sees Pope Francis as "a voice of sanity in a troubled world" – but is she qualified to judge?

Still, let us rejoice in the fact that she and probably millions of others see in Pope Francis a man of "tremendous goodness"  and give thanks to God for our Pope, and for our Cardinal John Dew. 

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