Thursday, August 07, 2014

"Schizophrenic Catholicism" - a serious problem


Sometimes I have referred to this problem as that of a discrepancy between "word and deed," at other times as the problem of "dishonesty in advertising." No matter what we call it, it's a toxic problem.

2 comments:

bill bannon said...

But every paid Catholic pundit has an area where he won't go lest his income vanish. What Voris is saying about modernism is found in section 42 of Verbum Domini by Pope Benedict XVI on the matter of the herem...the massacres which scripture ascribes to God mandating them which mandate Benedict is reinterpreting as fictional and he is saying they were low morals. Why won't Voris say it? He probably didn't notice but if he did notice and publically said Benedict was infected with modernism, he would lose paying subscribers. This money thing keeps most Catholic writing narrow and safe. Here is Verbum Domini sect. 42 in part. It is festooned with the scriptural approach that past Popes warned about and you'll notice its claim that the prophets challenged every form of violence is delusional...Elijah killed 552 idolaters, Samuel killed Agag, Eliseus cursed 42 children who were killed by bears, Jeremiah told the Chaldeans to perfectly slaughter the Moabites. But to Benedict's text:

" Revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times and thus describes facts and customs, such as cheating and trickery, and acts of violence and massacre, without explicitly denouncing the immorality of such things. This can be explained by the historical context, yet it can cause the modern reader to be taken aback, especially if he or she fails to take account of the many “dark” deeds carried out down the centuries, and also in our own day. In the Old Testament, the preaching of the prophets vigorously challenged every kind of injustice and violence, whether collective or individual, and thus became God’s way of training his people in preparation for the Gospel. So it would be a mistake to neglect those passages of Scripture that strike us as problematic. Rather, we should be aware that the correct interpretation of these passages requires a degree of expertise, acquired through a training that interprets the texts in their historical-literary context and within the Christian perspective which has as its ultimate hermeneutical key “the Gospel and the new commandment of Jesus Christ brought about in the paschal mystery”.[140] I encourage scholars and pastors to help all the faithful to approach these passages through an interpretation which enables their meaning to emerge in the light of the mystery of Christ."

Exactly what past popes warned of.

Pertinacious Papist said...

Hi Bill,

Did I miss something? Was this subject somewhere in the post or video?

I'm with you on opposing the demythologizing of Scripture, an old pathetic conceit of R. Bultmann. But that's another story.

Thanks, PB