Vatican City, May 28, 2018 / 10:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Ideologies which do not acknowledge and uphold the dignity of human life must be resisted and the Catholic Church’s teaching on life affirmed, Pope Francis told a group of Catholic doctors Monday.
“The Church is for life, and her concern is that nothing is against life in the reality of a concrete existence, however weak or defenseless, even if not developed or not advanced,” the pope said May 28 in the Vatican's papal hall.
He noted the “hardships and difficulties” physicians may face when they are faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church, particularly when they promote and defend human life “from its conception to its natural end.”
Doctors “are called to affirm the centrality of the patient as a person and his dignity with his inalienable rights, primarily the right to life,” he said.
“The tendency to debase the sick man as a machine to be repaired, without respect for moral principles, and to exploit the weakest by discarding what does not correspond to the ideology of efficiency and profit must be resisted.”
Pope Francis spoke with members of the International Federation of Associations of Catholic Physicians ahead of a congress on the theme of “Holiness of life and the medical profession, from Humanae vitae to Laudato si'” in Zagreb, Croatia May 30-June 2.
Addressing the group, he praised the fidelity of their associations to the directives of the Magisterium and encouraged them to “continue with serenity and determination on this path.”
To be a Catholic doctor means to feel driven by “faith and from communion with the Church” to grow in Christian and professional formation and to know the laws of nature in order “to better serve life,” he said, stressing that the participation of Catholic physicians in the life and mission of the Church is “so necessary.”
Francis noted that the health and medical fields are a part of the advance of the “technocratic cultural paradigm,” which adores human power without limits and makes everything irrelevant if it does not serve a person’s own interests.
“Be more and more aware that today it is necessary and urgent that the action of the Catholic physician presents itself with an unmistakable clarity on the level of personal and associative testimony,” he urged.
He also encouraged working together with professionals of other religious convictions who also recognize the dignity of the human person, and with priests and religious who work in the healthcare field.
Continue the journey “with joy and generosity,” he said, “in collaboration with all the people and institutions that share the love of life and endeavor to serve it in its dignity and sacredness.”
Pope Francis marked the feast of the Holy Trinity stressing the personal love and interest God has in each one of his children, saying the Lord is not ever far away, but is an attentive and loving father to all.
VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis marked the feast of the Holy Trinity stressing the personal love and interest God has in each one of his children, saying the Lord is not ever far away, but is an attentive and loving father to all.
“God does not want so much to reveal to us that he exists, but rather that he is the ‘God with us,’ that he loves us, is interested in our personal story and cares for each person, from the smallest to the greatest,” the pope said May 27. Even though God is in heaven, he is also on earth, Francis said, adding that because of this, “we don’t believe in a distant, indifferent entity.” “On the contrary, (we believe) in the love that created the universe and generated a people, became flesh, died and rose for us, and as the Holy Spirit transforms everything and brings it to fullness.” Francis spoke to the nearly 25,000 pilgrims present in St. Peter’s Square for his Sunday Angelus address. In his speech, he focused on the day’s feast of the Holy Trinity, and the readings from the Book of Romans, as well as the Gospel reading from Matthew. The feast of the Trinity, Francis said, is not only an invitation to contemplate and praise Jesus Christ, but it is also an opportunity to celebrate “with ever-new wonder the God of love, who freely offers his life to us and asks us to spread it in the world.” He then turned to the second reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, in which the apostle speaks of how Christians are sons of God, and are able to call him “abba,” meaning “father.” St. Paul, the pope said, experienced first-hand the deep transformation of the God of love, who allows us to not only call him “Father,” but more personally, “dad,” and who gives us the ability to call on him “with the total confidence of a child who abandons themselves in the arms of the one who gave them life.” Through his action in each person, the Holy Spirit “makes it so that Jesus Christ is not reduced to a person of the past, but that we feel close to him, our contemporary, and that we experience the joy of being beloved children of God,” Francis said. He noted that Christians are not alone, he said, because the Holy Spirit was sent to guide and accompany them. And thanks to both the presence of the Spirit and the strength he offers, “we can realize with serenity the mission that he entrusted to us: to announce and bear witness to his Gospel to everyone and so dilate communion with him and the joy that comes from it.” Pope Francis closed his address saying the feast of the Holy Trinity “makes us contemplate the mystery of a God who incessantly creates, redeems and sanctifies, always with love and for love, and to every creature that welcomes him, he gives the gift of reflecting a ray of his beauty, goodness and truth.” He prayed that Mary would help each person to “fulfill with joy the mission of bearing witness to the world, thirsty for love, that the meaning of life is precisely infinite love, the concrete love of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” After leading pilgrims in praying the traditional Marian prayer, Francis voiced gratitude for the recent beatification of Sister Leonella Sborbati, a nun with the Consolata Missionaries who was killed in Somalia in 2006. He asked pilgrims to join him in praying for Africa, “so that there is peace there,” and led faithful in praying a Hail Mary for the continent.
“From one
single stock He created the
whole human race
so that they could occupy
the entire earth”.
Acts 17:26
Kenneth Baker defends this biblical truth in his book, Fundamentals of Catholicism:
God, Trinity, Creation, Christ, Mary, p. 145):
According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were the very first man and woman. Thus, we read in Genesis 2:5 that before Adam "there was not a man
to till the earth.” Also, Adam "named his wife 'Eve’ because she was the
mother of all those who live” (Gen 3:20). St. Paul teaches the same
truth in Acts 17:26, "From one single stock he created the whole human
race so that they could occupy the entire earth”.
Not so for Cardinal George Pell, however. Many Christians shuddered during
his TV debate with Richard Dawkins in which - to the great surprise of Dawkins
and the ABC’s (non-impartial) facilitator, Tony Jones, Cardinal Pell flatly
denied the existence of Adam and Eve.
I was
not feeling at all well today so I stayed in the very comfortable leather
chair, in front of the new LCD TV and watched the program.
Why do
I allow myself to do these things?
It
wasn't just awful - it was unsettling. And I was already unsettled!
Yes
folks; I watched 'Q&A' - I
watched Richard (there is no God) Dawkins debate Cardinal George (not sure
about my Bible) Pell - the most influential Roman Catholic in
Australia.
Yes
folks; I watched and listened to George Pell declare that Adam and Eve never
existed; they were a myth. Alas, if that was the only gaff I heard!
….
Though shocking, this is hardly surprising considering that Pell, in
1967, presented a dissertation in Rome defending the theology of Teilhard de
Chardin for which he was granted high honours.
Susan Claire Potts summed up Teilhard’s own approach to Adam and Eve, and
related matters, in her article for The Remnant:
“Teilhard de Chardin and the
Catholic 'Evolution'”, when she wrote: “Forget Genesis. Forget Adam and Eve. They did not
actually exist. To Teilhard, the universe began from something—a je ne sais quoi, perhaps the God Particle the Cern scientists are trying to isolate”.
Here is her feisty article
in full:
I was in
the backyard, scissors in hand, checking my flowers. The roses were in bloom,
and I wanted to cut some for the crystal bud vase in my kitchen. I walked over
to the largest bush. It was so tall it almost reached the breakfast room
window. It dwarfed the bushes on each side.
Why is that one so much bigger than the rest? I wondered as I
hurried over to it. When I got closer, I was surprised to see how bare the
branches were. There were only a few blooms and fewer buds on the bush. But
the thing’s huge, I said to myself. Where are the roses?
Curious,
I reached for the tallest stalk. It had leaves and thorns, but no blossoms.
Green as the leaves of the floribunda, strong as the stem, and thicker than my
thumb, I recoiled when I realized what it was. Although the branches grew
beside and within and over the rosebush, the thing was not part of it.
It was
fake.
And worse
than that, it was choking the life out of the rosebush.
No way! I wasn’t about to let
that happen. I attacked the weed with a vengeance. As I yanked and pulled and
cut the sterile branches out from my struggling rosebush, the metaphor hit me
square in the face.
The plight of the rose and the vigor of
the weed are like what’s happening to the Church. A new teaching has taken
root. The weed is Teilhardism, and it is killing the rose. It’s sapping its
strength and crowding the rose out of its rightful place in the garden. If left
alone, it will destroy the rose.
Don’t expect the master gardeners to get
rid of it. They love the Weed. They nurture it, extol its beauty, and feed it.
Like the courtiers around the emperor with no clothes, they proclaim its
magnificence: See the wonder of the Weed! See how lovely the color! See the
freshness of the leaves! Smell its fragrance!
Don’t listen to them. Don’t go near it.
Let’s take a look at this thing.
We’re not dealing with known heresies,
with denials of certain points of doctrine nor even the serpentine modernism
that infiltrates the Church and suffocates her members. We are facing nothing
less than a bizarre new religion.
It masquerades as Catholicism, renewed and
reclothed for the modern mind—which makes it even more insidious, more
difficult to pinpoint and excise. But it’s here, there’s no denying it. The
Thing has risen up from the sea of unbelief like the Beast of the Apocalypse
ready to devour the Woman.
As I wrote in Against the Wolves the
new faith was imagined and fleshed out by one man, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin[1], a
world-enamored priest rhapsodizing over his baby—a reimagined Christianity.
Unlike heretics, Teilhard doesn’t dispute this or that point of doctrine.
Unlike schismatics, he doesn’t deny the authority of the Roman Church. No, he
simply sidesteps the whole thing. He reinterprets the Faith, then argues from
the reinterpretation.
As Mohammedism has no history before
Mohammed,
Mackey’s comment: I have argued in
various articles that there was no historical Mohammed, that Mohammed
(Muhammad) was basically a biblical composite.
so the new religion sprang fully formed
from the mind of the rambling Jesuit. Just as Mohammed wove threads from the
Old Covenant, early Christianity, and the Arab worship of the moon god Al-Ilah
into a cloth called Islam, so Teilhard has sewn a garment of Eastern mysticism,
speculative science, and spiritual evolution. Thrown over the Body of Christ,
it lies like a shroud over the Church.
Like every heresiarch before him, Teilhard
laid out the philosophical roadmap. He ransacked the Sacred Teachings of our
Faith, picking out an idea here, a dogma there; and then, like a diabolical
sorcerer, he threw them into a cauldron with a pseudo-scientific bouquet of
fine herbs and hung the pot over the fire to cook his poison.
His prose soars, his erudition shines, but
it’s not Catholic. He twists what we believe, sprinkling the admixture of
disputed science and empty theology with lovely Latin phrases and quotes from
the masters of the spiritual life.
His disciples (who are legion) extol the
brilliance of his work. A reconciliation of theology and science, they proclaim
it a faith fit for Modern Man. It’s about Love and Progress and ultimate
Divinization. There is no sin--error perhaps, but, no worries, it’s
all being caught up in the forward rush of History. “Everything in the world
follows the road to unification.”[2]
Teilhard whispers words of encouragement;
he offers a new viaticum: “Our spiritual being is continually nourished by
the continuous energies of the perceptible universe.”
Distinctions will fall away. The rocks,
the rivers, the distant stars, the shimmering moon—all will be swept up in a
great transcendent burst of energy. It will be the Parousia, the Second Coming:
Mackey’s comment: For my own view on this, see my article:
the revelation of the Cosmic Christ—the
divinization of the Universe.
“Men of little faith,” Teilhard shouts,
“Why then do you fear or repudiate the progress of the world?...To divinize
does not mean to destroy but to sur-create.”[3]
So the World is becoming Christ.
I’m serious. That’s the goal. The Omega
Point. Not Heaven or Hell. Not Judgment or Mercy. Where is the Holy Trinity in
his work? Where are the Blessed Mother and the saints? Where are the angels?
He even recasts the meaning of the Cross.
Sir Julian Huxley, in his introduction to The Human Phenomenon[4], explains it for us: “The redemption of the cross had to be
reconciled with the salvation of the world through active co-operation in the
building up of the universe.”[5]
Say what?
The whole thing is a spawn of Hell, a dark
system of belief that uses Catholic words, wears the vestments, and light the
candles, but there is no truth in it. It is false.
Don’t take my word for it. Pick up his
books and read them if you can. They make no sense. Reason has been cast to the
wind. Huxley goes on: “Teilhard uses convergence to denote the tendency of
mankind, during its evolution to superpose centripetal on centrifugal trends so
as to prevent centrifugal differentiation from leading to fragmentation:”[6]
Get it? Everything is converging,
everything is unifying. It will all be stuck together by sap. Don’t laugh.
That’s what Teilhard calls it. He posits a “positive confluence of Christian
life with the natural sap of the universe.”
All things work together, not for the
Glory of God and the salvation of souls, but for the realization of the Cosmic
Christ. Jesus of Nazareth? Ah, he was just the “historical Jesus,” not the same
thing at all. We await the Pleroma, the fullness of time, when in a great burst
of something, the entire universe is transformed and the Cosmic
Christ revealed.
This is worse than nonsense. There is no
salvation in it, no God to adore—only divinized Matter. Evolution is “matter
becoming cephalized.” How do you like that? Rocks becoming conscious, lying
beneath the Noosphere[7]—that imagined membrane on the earth’s
surface, a supposed thinking layer superimposed on the lifeless layer of
inorganic matter.
It gets worse. Forget Genesis. Forget Adam
and Eve. They did not actually exist. To Teilhard, the universe began from something—a
je
ne sais quoi, perhaps the God Particle the Cern scientists are
trying to isolate. Over eons and eons the universe evolved according to its own
inner becoming. Man appeared as an epiphenomenon, conscious, as
the whole cosmos someday will be.
Individual salvation is not mentioned. The
Second Coming? What’s that? Teilhard would rather call it by the unfamiliar
name, The Parousia. That way he can reinterpret it. We don’t have
to worry about sin or repentance, virtue or grace. All we have to do is let
ourselves be united with the universe. We must not be divisive or contrary. We
must not stop this deifying Movement. All will be One. And peace will reign
forever.
I’m telling you—if you start thinking this
creature can be domesticated, tamed to live peacefully with Tradition, you’re
mistaken. This isn’t the time for gentle speech. The beast needs to be driven
out of the Church before all the lambs are dead.
It’s not like we weren’t warned. We were
taught about the End Times and the Great Apostasy. We were warned of the
Antichrist. We were told that hearts would grow cold and people would believe
fables.
The world has always been at odds with
Truth, but now, a Trojan Horse has entered the City of God and laid waste the
fields and the meadows. The fig tree is sterile, and there is no Glory in the
Olive.
Archbishop Sheen once said that we are
living in the days of the Apocalypse.[8] I think we’re there.
….
[1] Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., 1881 –
1955. A French Jesuit, Teilhard was trained as
a paleontologist
and geologist.
His principal works are Le
Phenomene Humain, The
Mass on the World, and The
Divine Milieu. Forbidden by his superiors to publish during his
lifetime, his manuscripts were copied and spread by his devotees. His works
were published after his death, and the Holy Office issued a monitum against them.
