John Paul II a "saint?"

St. Paul said:

Is this a joke? In April he will become a "saint." The guy who helped protect thousands of child molesters? Is this your idea of a "saint?" What a disgrace and embarrassment! How do Catholics feel about this atrocity?

Click to expand...

That we're all sinners, and our righteousness before God isn't determined by who we are or what we've done, but on what Christ has done in our stead. And that John Paul II, while sinner that he may be, and whatever mistakes he might have made, he still proclaimed Christ--and that regardless of whether he is canonized a saint or not, he remains a saint on account of Christ and His righteousness by the Gospel. Just like you and me.

-CryptoLutheran

His intentions were good, but I think he disqualified himself when he kissed a Koran, chaired two inter-religious prayer meetings in Assisi, where pagans prayed to their idols, let Buddhists burn incense around a Buddha statue that the put on a tabernacle, presided at a World Youth Day where priests handed out Holy Communion in cardboard boxes . . .

The popes I admire died years before my birth: St. Pius X, Pius XI, Leo XIII Bl. Pius IX, St. Pius V.

St. Paul said:

No. This guy was supposed to be the "vicar of Christ!" Supposedly infallible in doctrine and morals. The lake of fire awaits him in my opinion and good riddance. He rejected Christ when he kissed the Koran and bowed to a statue of Buddha. Christ made it VERY clear. Salvation is found ONLY through him!!

Click to expand...

I wish my Jewish friends a Happy Hanukkah. Yet, oddly enough, I haven't turned my back on Jesus, and I haven't converted to Judaism in doing so.

You're welcome to try and usurp God's right as Judge if you want. Me? I'm quite content to let our Lord be judge.

-CryptoLutheran

St. Paul said:

What does wishing Jewish friends a simple Happy Hanukkah have to do with kissing the Koran and committing idolatry by bowing to a statue of Buddha?

Click to expand...

It's an act of showing respect to others of different religions. Which I assumed is what you were taking issue with, as kissing a Qur'an and the act of bowing in East Asian culture would be acts of showing respect to Muslims and Buddhists respectively; and are diplomatic actions of one who represents over a billion Roman Catholics.

Now we can debate all day long what is and is not appropriate, and I'd likely agree with you on certain things being inappropriate. But to jump, headlong, into accusation that the John Paul II had rejected his Christian faith to become some sort of, Islamo-Buddhist(?) is--well--an odd one.

So I find your knee-jerk judgmentalism and gleeful willingness to stand in the position as Judge of the quick and the dead and consign one of your brothers in Christ to Hell a tad, well, off.

Perhaps inspect yourself, and see that it's not you who finds himself in hotter water when you must give an account before our Lord Jesus.

-CryptoLutheran

The kiss does more than show respect for the Muslims John Paul was with. It implies that he approves of their religion when other popes have taught the Islam is heretical.

John Paul's pontificate shocked me, partly because he must have know that in his encyclical Our Apostolic Mandate, Pope St. Pius X had already condemned Sillonism. Read OAM. It talks about a utopian, religiously indifferent group that forms to solve the world's social problems. That utopia looks a lot like John Paul's civilization of love.

I find it interesting when people who know nothing about popes or saints comment on popes and saints. JPII is on his way to sainthood, and there's nothing you can do about it. People much wiser and more knowledgeable have studied the issue and come to their conclusions.
Blaming JPII for hiding child molesters demonstrates just how little you know.

I also find it disgraceful when people give themselves user names of "Saint" anything. It's disgusting.

AvilaSurfer said:

I find it interesting when people who know nothing about popes or saints comment on popes and saints. JPII is on his way to sainthood, and there's nothing you can do about it. People much wiser and more knowledgeable have studied the issue and come to their conclusions.
Blaming JPII for hiding child molesters demonstrates just how little you know.

I also find it disgraceful when people give themselves user names of "Saint" anything. It's disgusting.

Click to expand...

I need to learn much, much more about saints, and I'm no expert in canonization. But I think I do know that to get canonized, someone needs to have had a heroic degree of each virtue, and I didn't see heroic prudence in JPII. I certainly don't see it in Pope Francis.

Bill McEnaney said:

I need to learn much, much more about saints, and I'm no expert in canonization. But I think I do know that to get canonized, someone needs to have had a heroic degree of each virtue, and I didn't see heroic prudence in JPII. I certainly don't see it in Pope Francis.

Click to expand...

And thank you for proving my point.

AvilaSurfer said:

And thank you for proving my point.

Click to expand...

Please give me an example of a heroically prudent thing that JPII did and of one that Francis did. Bl. Pius IX is still only blessed, and he's a 19th-century pope. But Benedict XVI fast-tracked John Paul II, probably because he thought JP's canonization would support the progressivism the Church has endured partly because of Vatican II, one of the worst disasters in her history.

St. Paul said:

No. This guy was supposed to be the "vicar of Christ!" Supposedly infallible in doctrine and morals.

Click to expand...

Infallible only when he makes an ex-cathedra teaching that fits very prescribed conditions - something most popes never do.

ebia said:

Infallible only when he makes an ex-cathedra teaching that fits very prescribed conditions - something most popes never do.

Click to expand...

Right you are, ebia. I hope everyone here knows the difference between infallibility and impeccability, because too many confuse the two. Impeccability is sinlessness. The Catholic Church needs her infallibility because popes sin and have faults. When a pope teaches infallibly, the Holy Ghost ensures that the pope won't teach a falsehood then. And faults can tempt even a pope to teach one.

Bill McEnaney said:

Please give me an example of a heroically prudent thing that JPII did and of one that Francis did. Bl. Pius IX is still only blessed, and he's a 19th-century pope. But Benedict XVI fast-tracked John Paul II, probably because he thought JP's canonization would support the progressivism the Church has endured partly because of Vatican II, one of the worst disasters in her history.

Click to expand...

Pope John Paul II's stance against the Soviet Union was proper, heroic, and quite important to bringing an end to the Cold War.

So far, I believe Pope Francis has been a wonderful pope, but I wouldn't describe anything he's done so far as particularly heroic.

Fireball1244 said:

Pope John Paul II's stance against the Soviet Union was proper, heroic, and quite important to bringing an end to the Cold War.

So far, I believe Pope Francis has been a wonderful pope, but I wouldn't describe anything he's done so far as particularly heroic.

Click to expand...

Fireball, JPII may have done some heroic things, though I don't know of any that seem that way to me. Earlier today, I heard a news report about a man who rescued people from a burning building. That was clearly a heroic action. But it doesn't tell me whether he was heroically virtuous. Before Vatican II, the Church had always require a a canonized saint to have a heroic degree of each virtue to qualify for canonization. Did John Paul II prove that he met that requirement. Not to my satisfaction. From my perspective, his pontificates of John Paul and Francis have been shocking disasters. If you haven't read about what happened to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, please do that. They've endured severe persecution because Pope Francis doesn't care for the Traditional Latin Mass. I like Francis the man, but hate his progressivism.

Bill McEnaney said:

Fireball, JPII may have done some heroic things, though I don't know of any that seem that way to me. Earlier today, I heard a news report about a man who rescued people from a burning building. That was clearly a heroic action. But it doesn't tell me whether he was heroically virtuous. Before Vatican II, the Church had always require a a canonized saint to have a heroic degree of each virtue to qualify for canonization. Did John Paul II prove that he met that requirement. Not to my satisfaction. From my perspective, his pontificates of John Paul and Francis have been shocking disasters. If you haven't read about what happened to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, please do that. They've endured severe persecution because Pope Francis doesn't care for the Traditional Latin Mass. I like Francis the man, but hate his progressivism.

Click to expand...

severe persecution?

BTW, what does "a heroic degree of each virtue" mean?

ebia said:

severe persecution?

BTW, what does "a heroic degree of each virtue" mean?

Click to expand...

You know, I'm sure, my friend, that Pope Benedict XVI wrote Summorum Pontificum to say that no one abrogated the Traditional Latin rite of Mass and that no priest needed any bishop's permission to use it. The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate had been using that one and the English one until Francis forbade them to use the Latin one. He even sent some members of that order to other countries, seemingly because he hoped to disband the FFI, though it did nothing to deserve that.

Francis had no authority to forbid the Latin Mass. In 1570, Pope Saint Pius V wrote his bull called "Quo Primum Tempore" to promulgate the Traditional Latin rite of Mass after he changed it slightly. In QPT, he obligated every Roman Rite priest to say that kind of Mass. His permanent rule bound his successors, too. But he made an exception for liturgies that were already 200 or older. In Session Seven's 13th Canon, the Council of Trent anathematizes anyone who change an existing rite of Mass into a new rite of it. Sadly, that's what Archbishop Bugnini and his committee did when the invented the vernacular rite of Mass that most Roman Rite Catholics go to now. I'm no liturgical expert. I'm not even trying to be "more Catholic than the Pope." But if I know what it is Trent and St. Pius V are telling us, the New Mass shouldn't even exist, let alone be forced on anyone.

I'm sorry. I should have said what I meant by "heroic degree of virtue," because the phrase is ambiguous. In the phrase "heroic degree" is about how much virtue someone has. I'm not talking about an official certificate from, say, a college or a university. The question isn't whether John Paul II has ever done anything that was heroic. It's whether he was holy enough to qualify for canonized sainthood. Most canonized ones get canonized many years after their deaths, because the Church usually does plenty of research to see whether they lived saintly lives. For me, John Paul's inter-religious prayer meetings in Assisi in 1986 and 2002 proved that he was not heroically prudent. Religious indifferentism, the belief that any religion is good enough to get people to Heaven, is a heresy that Blessed Pius IX condemns in his Syllabus of Errors. But in my opinion, those meetings implied that indifferentism because even pagans prayed at them.

Francis and John Paul II are thoroughly likable, kind, gentle, devout men. For me, though, that's not the most important thing about their pontificates. Catholics believe that a pope is a monarch with a duty to condemn heresies, to teach the religion that Sacred Tradition delivered to us from the Apostles, and to protect the faithful from those heresies, too. He has other duties as well. He needs to rule the Catholic Church, to govern it, for example. My question is, "How well does any pope do what his office requires and always has required him to do. From my perspective, St. Pius X was a pope much, much better than any pope who came after Pius XII. But he was hardly a media darling. He drove the Modernist heresy underground. Today it's back again. In fact, I think today's Catholic religiously indifferent ecumenism results from it. Each time I remember the Assisi meetings, they remind me that St. Pius X calls Modernism "the synthesis of all heresies." Please see his encyclical "Pascendi Dominici Gregis" if you want to.

Bill McEnaney said:

You know, I'm sure, my friend, that Pope Benedict XVI wrote Summorum Pontificum to say that no one abrogated the Traditional Latin rite of Mass and that no priest needed any bishop's permission to use it. The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate had been using that one and the English one until Francis forbade them to use the Latin one. He even sent some members of that order to other countries, seemingly because he hoped to disband the FFI, though it did nothing to deserve that.

Click to expand...

Hardly what I would call "severe persecution". Some consequence for disobedience, perhaps.

Francis had no authority to forbid the Latin Mass.

Click to expand...

Hm. Pope verses random person on the Internet as the proper arbiter of that.

I'm sorry. I should have said what I meant by "heroic degree of virtue," because the phrase is ambiguous. In the phrase "heroic degree" is about how much virtue someone has. I'm not talking about an official certificate from, say, a college or a university. The question isn't whether John Paul II has ever done anything that was heroic. It's whether he was holy enough to qualify for canonized sainthood. Most canonized ones get canonized many years after their deaths, because the Church usually does plenty of research to see whether they lived saintly lives. For me, John Paul's inter-religious prayer meetings in Assisi in 1986 and 2002 proved that he was not heroically prudent. Religious indifferentism, the belief that any religion is good enough to get people to Heaven, is a heresy that Blessed Pius IX condemns in his Syllabus of Errors. But in my opinion, those meetings implied that indifferentism because even pagans prayed at them. Francis and John Paul II are thoroughly likable, kind, gentle, devout men. For me, though, that's not the most important thing about their pontificates. Catholics believe that a pope is a monarch with a duty to condemn heresies, to teach the religion that Sacred Tradition delivered to us from the Apostles, and to protect the faithful from those heresies, too. He has other duties as well. He needs to rule the Catholic Church, to govern it, for example. My question is, "How well does any pope do what his office requires and always has required him to do. From my perspective, St. Pius X was a pope much, much better than any pope who came after Pius XII. But he was hardly a media darling. He drove the Modernist heresy underground. Today it's back again. In fact, I think today's Catholic religiously indifferent ecumenism results from it. Each time I remember the Assisi meetings, they remind me that St. Pius X calls Modernism "the synthesis of all heresies." Please see his encyclical "Pascendi Dominici Gregis" if you want to.

Click to expand...

You've explained why you think you get to be pope over the pope, but you haven't explained what "heroic virtue" means.