#43 OF 45 - THE POLITICAL POPE & THE WAYWARD SHEPHERD NATIONAL REVIEW

# 43 OF 45 -"THE POLITICAL POPE" & "THE WAYWARD SHEPHERD" NATIONAL REVIEW

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - BLOGGER, George H. Kubeck, Sun. March 8, 2020

 

We are almost finished with this Book Report.

George Neumayer, The Political Pope, Center Street, N.Y. 2017, Excerpts p. 218

    "Shocked by the pope's speech to the U.S. Congress in 2015, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, commented to LifeSiteNews that " it must send a very clear signal to conservative Catholics that they have faced exactly what they have feared, a Pope who is not only leaning left, but is going to take the Roman Catholic Church to the left with him."

 

    "Morale is low." says a priest in an interview for this book. "We reached a moment of hope after the last two popes. That hope has been replaced by fear and trembling. Francis is the worst pope in centuries. "We were spoiled with the last two popes," says another priest interviewed for this book. "Now we are on Code Red Alert."

    

  "In 2016, forty-five scholars sent a letter to the Church's cardinals, asking them to seek clarification from the pope on Amoris Laetitia... Fr. Aidan Nichols, identified nineteen statements in the pope's exhortation that lend themselves to "heretical" interpretation.

 

"... Request that the College of Cardinals and the Patriarchs of the Catholic Church take collective action to respond to the dangers to Catholic faith and morals posed by the apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia issued by Pope Francis on March 19th, 2016. [Imagine this is almost 4 years ago.]

 

     This apostolic exhortation contains a number of statements that can be understood in a sense that is contrary to Catholic faith and morals. We have specified the nature and degree of the errors that could be attributed to Amoris laetitia in the accompanying document. We request that the Cardinals and Patriarchs petition the Holy Father to condemn the errors listed in the document in a definite and final manner, and to authoritatively state that Amoris laetitia does not require any of them to be believed or considered as possibly true.

 

    "Just as it is lawful to resist the pope that attacks the body," argued St. Robert Bellarmine, the celebrated sixteenth-century Jesuit, "it is also lawful to resist the one who attacks souls or who disturbs civil order, or, above all, who attempts to destroy the Church... to resist him by not doing what he orders and preventing his will from being executed."

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"The Wayward Shepherd" by Daniel J. Mahoney, NATIONAL REVIEW, Feb. 24, 2020 p. 28

 

    "Cardinal Robert Sarah, the African-born bishop and heads the Congregation for Divine Worship, shows the way to faithful witness in this time of troubles. He does not attack the pope by name and never ceases to proclaim his (genuine) filial devotion to the Holy Roman Pontiff. But at every step, loyal to the apostolic inheritance, he exposes the fatuousness of the new Christianity.

 

    In The Day Is Now Far Spent, a collection of his conversation with French journalist Nicolas Diat that was published by the invaluable Ignatius Press in 2019, Sarah eloquently and faithfully pleads for a Christian witness in which prayer is not eaten away by reckless activism, in which true charity is not confused with humanitarian ideology, in which the liturgy invokes the sacred presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ., and in which theology is not transformed into politics. (I am paraphrasing a crucial chapter in the book). Sarah came of age in Sekou  Toure's Guinea, so he experienced Marxist-Leninist fanaticism from the inside. He saw doctrinaire egalitarianism at work, the atheistic persecution of religion, the cruel and sadistic ravages carried out by government police.

 

    He adamantly rejects the "preferential pontificate for [left-wing] dictatorship" that has sadly marked the Franciscan pontificate, as well as its lamentable indifference to "Islamic fanaticism , which kills to establish a reign of terror." Sarah love political liberty rooted in personal responsibility and "joyous self-limitation." (You recognize the influence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom Sarah quotes in the book as much as he quotes Benedict XVI.)               George H. Kubeck