Little Ones

Excerpt from RORATE CÆLI: Ratzinger: Hierarchy, Theologians must not scandalize "the little ones": - Primary good of the Church is protecting Faith of Ordinary People - Those in authority cannot abuse the Faithful's readiness to listen

"and whosoever shall scandalize even one of these little ones that believe in me, it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were cast into the sea” (Mark 9, 42).

The “little ones” here in this verse, are not children; with this term, in Jesus’ language, He is indicating His disciples, the future Christians. Moreover the “scandal” that seduces them is not a sexual seduction, but the stumbling stone that brings them to a loss of the Faith.

“To give scandal,” according to the results of present exegesis, means, “to disturb the faith” and, thus, “ to deprive of eternal salvation.” The primary good for which the Church is responsible is the faith of ordinary people. Attention for the faith of simple people must also be the intimate criteria of every theological doctrine. The one who is not merely doing private research, but is teaching on behalf of the Church, must be aware of this. To take on a task of this type and to speak not in the name of the common subject which is the Church implies the taking on of responsibilities for which the individual imposes some limits on himself.

Indeed, he is thus given an authority that as a private teacher and without men’s trust in the word of the Church he would not have. With authority, he is given power, which is responsibility, as it is not about a power which has its origins in him; [this power] has its foundation in the mandate from the Church in whose name he is given to speak.

Those who speak about abuse of power regarding the way teaching in the Church is disciplined, today are thinking only of the usual abuse of power from those in the Church that have this duty. However, forgotten, instead, is that there is also an abuse of power given by means of the mandate to teach; this is the abuse of those who take advantage, for a purely private word, of that readiness to listen and of that trust which is given, even today, to the word of the Church.

Church authority becomes an accomplice in this abuse of power if it tolerates that this is done without qualms, and so places its authority there where it is not allowed. For her [the Church], concern for the faith of the little ones must be more important than fearing the opposition of the powerful.

•••End of excerpt•••

This is what authentic pastoral care is, reconciling love of God and love of neighbor. Thanks Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

Center of the Universe

Pope Francis
I believe that this is the strongest moment for anthropological reductionism," he said.

"What is happening to humanity at the moment is what happens when wine becomes brandy: it passes through a phase of distillation, in organizational terms. It is no longer wine, but it is something else: perhaps more useful, more qualified, but it is not wine!"

He said that for mankind, it is the same: "man passes through this transformational phase and ends up – and I am serious – losing his humanity and becoming a tool of the system, a social and economic system, a system where imbalance reigns. When mankind loses his humanity, what happens to us? What occurs is what I would describe in simple terms as a throwaway policy or sociology: what is no longer useful is discarded, because man is not at the centre. And when man is not at the centre, there is something else in his place and man is at the service of this other thing."

"The idea, therefore, is to save mankind, in the sense of restoring him to the centre: to the centre of society, of thought, of reflection. Restoring mankind to the centre. You do good work. You study, reflect, hold conferences for this reason – so that mankind is not discarded."

"Children are discarded – we all know about today's birth rates, at least in Europe; the elderly are discarded, because they are not 'useful'. And now? An entire generation of young people is discarded, and this is very serious! I have seen a figure: 75 million young people, under the age of 25, without work. The 'neither-nor' young: those who neither work nor study. They do not study because they do not have the opportunity, and the do not work because there is no work."

"Who will be the next to be discarded? Let us stop this in time, please!”

The Pope thanked those present for their work and their initiatives “to restore balance to this imbalanced situation and to recover mankind, ” he exclaimed. “And this is not theology, it is philosophy and human reality."


Benedict XVI.

The divine and universal law of creation is divine love, incarnate in Christ. However, this should not be understood in a poetic but in a real sense.
The Son of man himself epitomizes the earth and Heaven, the Creation and the Creator, the flesh and the Spirit. He is the centre of the cosmos and of history, for in him the Author and his work are united without being confused with each other.
And it is precisely with the resurrection of the dead that he became "pre-eminent in all things" (Col 1: 18). Jesus himself affirms this, appearing to his disciples after the Resurrection: "all authority in Heaven and on earth has been given to me" (Mt 28: 18). This awareness supports the way of the Church, Body of Christ, on the paths of history. There is no shadow, however dark, that can obscure Christ's light. This is why believers in Christ never lack hope, even today, in the face of the great social and financial crisis that is tormenting humanity, in the face of the destructive hatred and violence that have not ceased to stain many of the earth's regions with blood, in the face of the selfishness and pretension of the human being in establishing himself as his own God, which sometimes leads to dangerous distortions of the divine plan concerning life and the dignity of the human being, the family and the harmony of the Creation. Our efforts to free human life and the world from the forms of poison and contamination that could destroy the present and the future retain their value and meaning as I noted in the Encyclical Spe Salvi mentioned above even if we apparently fail or seem powerless when hostile forces appear to gain the upper hand, because "it is the great hope based upon God's promises that gives us courage and directs our action in good times and bad" (n. 35).

Sadly

Sadly, it seems true.

Slum Pleasures goes... I have received, and published already, the following comment:

This Francis fool was the perfect candidate to weaken Papacy to the point of irrelevance, I visited Argentina 2 years ago, when I was working for a russian news agency and visited some slums in Buenos Aires to cover the work of the “curas villeros” (slum priests) in the many shanty towns of the capital, I was shocked to see that practically all those priests had concubines and had sons with them, other were openly homosexual or had transexual partners and everyone knew about this!I talked with people from the slums and asked them what did they think about this? their answers were basically the same: “it’s ok, they love each other, they harm nobody” I also talked with more cultured (and minoritarian) sectors of the catholic church in Buenos Aires who were infuriated by the situation but they were unable to do anything about it, they said they were largely outnumbered by the “populist priests”.They also told me that all the high hierarchy of the church in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio included, were aware of the dubious morality of the slum priests, the argentine traditionalist catholics also told me that in those slums the priest is considered a “fairy godmother” by the poor people who live there, in fact the priests are to many of them the only “help” since the hypecorrupt state is practically absent, thus the priest is perceived as a ” good nanny” who feeds and takes care, so no one dares or bothers to question his life and morality, to slum people everything the priests do is ok as long as they keep supplying them with free stuff…. a doctrine of sterile assistentialism that leads nowhere, keeps the poor in poverty, the lazy in laziness and the sinner happy with his sins.Bergoglio has started to export this model of spiritual misery and moral decay to the rest of the world since he was elected and sadly he will continue vomiting the filthy populist nonsense that’s been coming out of argentina provincial, ultracorrupt politics for decades.

Read the entire article.



One commenter said:

María Victoria Álvarez on September 18, 2013 at 4:53 pm

Dear Mundabor, I’m argerntine and what this post says it’s absolutely true, Bergoglio condoned , tolerated and encouraged all kind of transgresions, heresies and sins here in my country, now I’m seeing that he’s doing the same in Rome and he wants to spread this pestilence all over the world. The ricca scandal pales in comparisson to the myriad of sex scandals that the argentine catholics have witnessed during “The bergoglio era” but as this post says: since the traditionalist catholics are a minority the voices of those who denounce these scandals are lost in the maremagnum of praises and justifications from low, little people who get some “welfare benefit” from them.

Christ is the King

I acknowledge Christ as the King of my life and of the Universe. In service to Him alone can we truly serve humanity for He is the Source of all that is Good and loving. He is Goodness. He is love.