“Today we are being tested” — Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
Please Note: Archbishop Sheen had a great love for Pope Paul VI. Other traditional Catholics, who also love bishop Sheen, are more critical … But those of us who love the traditional Faith cannot forget that it was Paul who gave us Humanae Vitae and consecrated Pope Benedict XVI bishop; and that it was he, Benedict, who gave us Summorum Pontificum, restoring access to the “old” Mass. That this was subsequently retracted by Pope Francis is a great mystery and trial for very many. But we can never repudiate any of the Popes without collapsing into schism. All final judgments in this matter of Popes and the Mass — and of theology in general —are reserved to the Church alone. Until then our judgments can only be opinions. SH.
Archbishop Sheen on Leaving the Church:
First Three Falls and Rises. “Crisis in Christendom.”
“The first time the Church was in dire straits was in the fall of Rome, the first 500-year period. It had a rebirth when great saint-missionaries like Augustine in England and Patrick in Ireland spread the faith.
Then came a second “decay” around the year 1,000 with the Moslem invasions and the split of the Church with a schism in Constantinople.
“It seemed to be the end of everything. And then we came to life again,” Sheen said.
In the third 500-year period he said the Church became “rotten” as nuns and priests were defecting. Then came the reformers who “almost always reform the wrong things. And they began reforming the faith, and there was nothing wrong with faith — it was the morals that needed to be reformed. It’s not renewal — it’s really a moral reformation that is needed today, too.” Remember, he saw and spoke about this fearlessly 48 years ago.
All the more so in our day…. Continue
The Pope Can Err We Know
“Although it clearly follows from the circumstances that the Pope can err at times, and command things which must not be done, that we are not to be simply obedient to him in all things, that does not show that he must not be obeyed by all when his commands are good.
“To know in what cases he is to be obeyed and in what not, it is said in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘One ought to obey God rather than man’; therefore, were the Pope to command anything against Holy Scripture, or the articles of faith, or the truth of the Sacraments, or the commands of the natural or divine law, he ought not to be obeyed, but in *such* commands, to be passed over.”
(Summa de Ecclesia, Juan Cardinal De Torquemada — 1388 – 26 September 1468, emphasis mine)
The Whole World
+ The Sexual Abuse Crisis Twenty Years Later
+ Unlike Clerical Abuse, Media Vastly Downplays Sexual Abuse in Public Schools
+ Sexual Abuse in Protestant Churches
+ John XXIII, Benedict XVI and Francis
+ Carlo Carreto’s love letter to the Church
+ Saint Augustine Warns against schism
Catholic Critique 