Pope Francis recently told a reporter for the Argentine newspaper La Nacion that he is “willing to do everything to stop the war. Everything.” Claiming that “the Vatican never rests” in its diplomatic efforts to bring peace to Ukraine, the pope had planned a June meeting in Jerusalem with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. But any hope for papal diplomacy was dashed last week when the Vatican abruptly cancelled the meeting.

It appears that the Vatican may indeed rest in its diplomatic efforts when high profile commentators in the Catholic press here in the United States and abroad criticize any attempt by Pope Francis to meet with the Russian patriarch. Some commentators have demanded that the pope “call out by name” President Putin, adding he has not done enough to denounce what they have identified as Kirill’s role in actually encouraging or blessing Putin’s alleged war crimes.

George Weigel, a Catholic commentator and distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in D.C., has been one of the harshest critics of the now-cancelled June meeting with Patriarch Kirill. Dismissing the diplomatic visit to Jerusalem to meet with Russian patriarch as a papal “fantasy,” Weigel wrote:

Some of those promoting a second Francis/Kirill encounter were likely thinking of the optics. Two religious leaders meeting in wartime to pray for peace would, they imagined, vividly demonstrate the Christian capacity to rise above ethnic hatred and national passion in the name of Easter faith and universal moral norms. That, however, was fantasy based on fallacy.

It is clear that Weigel has no respect for Patriarch Kirill. Claiming that Kirill has promoted an expansive vision of the Russian world that falsifies the Christian history of the eastern Slavs and underwrites a revival of tsarist and Stalinist imperialism, Weigel has called the patriarch a “mouthpiece in the Russian disinformation campaign proclaiming the tyrant Vladimir Putin as the savior of civilization against Western decadence.” Worse, Weigel accuses Kirill of “repeatedly deploying religious justifications for Russia’s barbaric assault on Ukraine,” and asks, “Is Kirill not, then, a blasphemer?”

Pope Francis has already said he is willing to do anything and “everything” to stop the war in Ukraine. He also has said that his relationship with Patriarch Kirill is “very good.” But, he also acknowledged that “others” have convinced him that canceling his conversation with the patriarch was necessary. In his interview with La Nacion, he said that “our diplomacy understood that a meeting of the two of us at this time could cause a lot of confusion.”

It is unfortunate that the anti-diplomacy side appears to be winning, even though it seems that Pope Francis truly wished to meet with the Russian patriarch. Pope Francis knows that he could make a difference in this war. Just as his saintly namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, defied the diplomats eight centuries ago by crossing the battlefield between Crusader and Muslim forces in order to meet Sultan al-Malik, Pope Francis should have an opportunity to promote peace in meeting with Patriarch Kirill. Pope Francis has already emulated St. Francis “in stressing the fraternity of the human family” throughout his papacy, in the documents he has promulgated and the outreach he has undertaken.

Pope Francis knows that people of God are not our enemies. He knows that Patriarch Kirill is not the enemy, though many commentators have attempted to make him so. In March, an article published in Religion News Service described the patriarch as “the only cleric in the world to bless the Russian atrocities in Ukraine.” In that same article, the author derisively pointed to Kirill’s $30,000 Swiss Breguet watch as proof that “he plays with the big boys.”

None of this name-calling is helpful. It is clear that Pope Francis is deeply aggrieved by the war in Ukraine, and he has enlisted the Papal Foundation to send aid to the Ukrainian people. Pope Francis has already shown in his writings and his actions throughout his papacy that he sees human fraternity as a “path for peace.” He should be supported in his efforts to take that path. A visit to Patriarch Kirill could mean the difference between peace and continued war.

Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

Source: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/pope-francis-can-help-end-the-ukraine-war/

The post Pope Francis Can Help End The Ukraine War first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

(RNS) — It is normal and customary to identify Pope Francis’ conservative critics as “traditionalists.” But much of what they say is a far cry from Catholic tradition — not least their criticism of the pope itself.

We need a new way to identify them.

Back in 2013, prominent conservative author George Weigel published “Evangelical Catholicism,” a manifesto for making the faith more like, well, evangelical Protestantism. In a shrewd review of the book, the great evangelical historian of American Christianity, Mark Noll, then teaching at Notre Dame, counted the ways. These include an embrace of biblicism, a call for personal evangelism, an emphasis on “friendship” with Jesus and even a celebration of adult baptism.

Thus did conservative Catholicism à la Weigel become inculturated with American evangelicalism (“inculturation” being the Catholic term for how the church engages with a particular culture, from 16th-century China to 21st-century Amazonia). And why not? Since the late 1970s, conservative Catholics and evangelicals have been allies in the culture war that has shaped American partisan politics.

Appearing shortly after the election of Pope Francis, Weigel’s book registers no concern that the Vatican and its episcopal appointees around the world would do anything to threaten the conservative “reform of the reform” of the Second Vatican Council undertaken by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Whoops. Six years into Francis’ papacy, the spirit of Vatican II is back big time, and, in response, the evangelical Catholicism of Weigel & Co. has become fundamentalist, in the original sense of the term.

Fundamentalism derives its name from a group of 90 essays titled “The Fundamentals” that were published between 1910 and 1915.  Some of them argued for classic Christian doctrines like the Virgin Birth, Christ’s bodily resurrection and physical return, and his substitutionary atonement on the cross.

But that project was driven by opposition to Darwinian evolution, which had made considerable headway in the mainline Protestant denominations. “The Fundamentals” promulgated a novel doctrine of the Bible’s inerrancy, insisting on the literal truth of its two creation stories in a way that fetishized Protestant biblicism.

Pope Francis attends an ecumenical and interreligious meeting with young people in Skopje, North Macedonia, on May 7, 2019. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Like their Protestant predecessors, today’s fundamentalist Catholics find themselves embroiled in what they consider a war for the soul of their church. Anti-traditionally, they have combined their new biblicism with (their understanding of) Catholic teaching and discipline into the supreme religious authority, beyond the power of the pope’s teaching authority (magisterium) or church council to change.

Pope Francis’ modest reform agenda has thus become anathema to them. “There’s a breakdown of the central teaching authority of the Roman pontiff,” Cardinal Raymond Burke, their foremost American figure, recently told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. “The successor of St. Peter exercises an essential office of teaching and discipline, and Pope Francis, in many respects, has refused to exercise that office.”

Exhibit A has been Francis’ decision to allow jurisdictions to permit Catholics who have divorced and remarried to take Communion as if that were more of a scandal to the principle of the indissolubility of marriage than the fig leaf of annulment — and as if the Eastern Orthodox, whose claim to Christian antiquity is equal to Roman Catholicism’s, not only permits this but allows second and third post-divorce marriages to take place in church.

In the just-concluded synod on the Amazon, the fundamentalists were scandalized by the call for married men to serve as priests in the Amazon region, as if Eastern Rite Catholic priests haven’t been married for centuries, and as if Pope Benedict this very decade didn’t authorize married Anglican priests who convert to serve as Catholic priests.

The fundamentalists were also scandalized by Francis’ reconvening a commission to study the history of women deacons in the church — a history well attested in the sources — presumably with an eye to authorizing the ordination of women as deacons sometime soon.

Most of all, the fundamentalists got their knickers in a twist over a two-foot-high indigenous carving of a naked pregnant woman, identified with an Incan figure called Pachamama, that was presented to the pope at the beginning of the synod and placed in a church in Rome (from which a young zealot removed it and threw it in the Tiber). In their view, it was a pagan idol, not an example of wholesome inculturation, as if portraying Pachamama as Our Lady of the Amazon was any more violative of Catholic belief than the assimilation of the Aztec Mother Goddess Tonantzin into the Virgin of Guadalupe.

A century ago, the original fundamentalists went to battle for control of the Protestant denominations and lost. But they stuck to their guns, set up their own ecclesial and media institutions and lived to fight another day.

In his Sunday column, Douthat argues that Burke et al. are likely to lose the battle for their church but that because it’s hard for conservative Catholics to abandon even a pope they disagree with, they’re unlikely to leave it — not that this hasn’t happened before. Whatever the case, they’ll go down fighting.

Source: https://religionnews.com/2019/11/12/the-rise-of-fundamentalist-catholicism/

The post The rise of fundamentalist Catholicism first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.