RE: Damned Catholics
April 9, 2023 at 7:53 pm
(This post was last modified: April 9, 2023 at 7:54 pm by Fake Messiah.)
They are warring. In some countries like Germany and Belgium, laypeople are taking charge of the Catholic Church and its rules. They think they know better than the Vatican and are bringing gay marriages and women priests.
The Vatican is kind of helpless because Germans are probably their main income.
The Vatican is kind of helpless because Germans are probably their main income.
Quote:German Synodal Path has paved the way for reform of Catholic Church practices regarding same-sex couples and lay preaching
Three years ago, at the end of January 2020, a service in the same building marked the beginning of the first assembly of the Synodal Path: a long conversation between Christian laity and bishops to make the Catholic Church, which had been heavily shaken by a series of abuse scandals, more credible and fit for the future.
Right from the start, the core idea was to work through the reasons for abuse and sexual violence in the church to prevent them occurring in future. In other words, the bishops also wanted to come to terms with the pitfalls of clerical power and abuse of power.
But then many other issues came up: Achieving gender justice in the church; making it possible for women to be ordained for church offices; practicing respect instead of exclusion with regard to sexual minorities; allowing the participation of congregations in church decisions. It was said again and again that this was a modernization process to bring the Catholic Church into the present.
At the last plenary assembly of the Synodal Path, there were official representatives from Australia, the Philippines, Tanzania, Peru, Belgium, Finland, Sweden and Italy.
It is increasingly clear that the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have a worldwide dimension. Victims have spoken out on every continent. And this has plunged the church into crisis in many regions.
In Germany, the Synodal Path has passed a total 15 resolutions, some of which have very concrete effects. Employees whose lifestyles do not conform to church guidelines can no longer be dismissed, for example, if they enter into a same-sex civil partnership or remarry after a divorce.
The Catholic Church also wants to recognize gender diversity. The training of clergy is to be reformed. And soon, in many places, women will be allowed to preach. The fact that there will now also be blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples has been celebrated as a success — although some courageous clergymen have already been practicing this for a while.
Pope Francis and the Vatican have been repeatedly critical of the consultative process of the Catholic Church in Germany and its controversial measures.
On occasion, the Vatican has been seen to have been instrumentalized by archconservative German bishops. But it is not new that the Vatican is wary of the Catholic Church in Germany, as it is financially strong and tends to be considered theologically liberal.
During the meeting in Frankfurt, Bishop of Antwerp Johan Bonny described how the Catholic bishops of Belgium had confronted the Vatican. In the Belgian Catholic Church, church blessings for same-sex couples have been possible since last year — although a good year earlier the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith expressly forbade such blessings.
https://www.dw.com/en/catholic-church-ge...a-64971479
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"