Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Even Peter Nods

 From Crisis:

Having the power to teach or to govern or to sanctify, therefore, is a charism that only Christ can confer, and one whose exercise, particularly in the papal office, requires at every turn, “a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith.
The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.
So many temptations, as it were, are served up by the spirit of a fallen age, and their very insidiousness will need especially to be resisted by Christ’s Vicar. The example of his saintly immediate predecessor came instantly to mind. Here was someone, said Benedict, who, “in the face of erroneous interpretations of freedom,” nevertheless stood tall in the saddle, insisting without the slightest equivocation upon “the inviolability of the human being and of human life from the moment of conception until natural death. The freedom to kill,” about which John Paul II simply would not compromise, “is not true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being to slavery.” (Read more.)
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