Priest: ‘The Vatican has become a theological Chernobyl’
NEW YORK, New York, December 20, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Vatican has become the equivalent of nuclear catastrophe in terms of its theology, a noted priest scholar said.
Father George Rutler, citing a number of Pope Francis’s statements and acts, including the pope’s recent pronouncements on the death penalty, said the Church’s highest office is diminished when its obligations to the perennial teachings of the fathers are neglected, and the faithful are also “at risk when they are offered confusion and superficiality in place of systematic thought.”
“In short,” Father Rutler said, “the Vatican has become a theological Chernobyl. We are in dangerous territory.”
Since capital punishment relates to natural law, he wrote, rejecting it as fundamentally wrong could affect any part of natural law.
Rutler, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York as well as an author, columnist, and broadcaster, wrote about Francis’s comments made on Monday to a Delegation of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty in a column for Catholic World Report.
When one reads the pope’s spontaneous remarks on varied topics today, “The quality of reasoning and information of facts is so fugitive, that frustration yields to sheer embarrassment,” he wrote.
Rutler cited for example in lead-up to his discussion of the pope’s death penalty remarks Francis’s comments to youth in Turin in June 2015. The pontiff had gone all over the map in listing concerns to the young people, he said, in an address that Reuters termed “a long, rambling talk about war, trust and politics.”
“While constrained by respect for the Petrine office,” Father Rutler said, “and aware of the strains that imposes, it is distressing to look for a train of thought and find only a train wreck.”
“That has to be the impression after reading the Pope’s remarks to a Delegation of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty,” he added.
Popes “in past centuries” ignored “the primacy of mercy over justice” in using the death penalty, Pope Francis stated Monday, also calling capital punishment an “inhuman form of punishment” that is now “always inadmissible.”
The pope had put aside his prepared speech during the private audience with the group, speaking to the anti-death penalty delegation in unscripted remarks. After the meeting, the Vatican provided the prepared address to reporters, also noting it had also been given to participants.
‘The progress of the doctrine of the most recent Pontiffs’ and ‘the change in the conscience of the Christian people’
The pontiff’s prepared remarks ran through his varied appeals over the years in favor of abolishing the death penalty.
The remarks referenced Francis’s recent change to Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he said, “Now expresses the progress of the doctrine of the most recent Pontiffs as well as the change in the conscience of the Christian people, which rejects a penalty that seriously harms human dignity.”
In August of this year, Francis changed the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated by Pope St. John Paul II, replacing n. 2267 of the Catechism with new text to say that the death penalty is “inadmissible” and that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
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