In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, September 24, 2013 Pope Francis said:
“I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.”
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So how can the Catholic Church have as its head a Pope that does not believe in a “Catholic God?”
Pope Francis does not believe in a Catholic God, And he does not believe in the Trinity either.
Catholics insist they are the true church who have preserved the Christian faith from the time of Christ and the apostles until this day.
The Church and the World
Catholic priests are taught:
The Church does not conform herself to the world. The Church exists to challenge the world.
Conforming to the latest cultural trends in the world is not being a good Christian. Trying to reinterpret the Gospels and the teaching of Jesus in order to be accepted by secular society is heresy.
The world will never accept the words of Jesus as Jesus spoke them. The unbelieving world chooses the words that they feel are “nice” and passionately argue against most of Jesus’ teaching. The heretical modern Catholic Church is the Church of “Be Nice,” not the Church of Christ.
Jesus told us that there would be a falling away and a departing from their faith in Him in the end times. He said that even professing Christians are going to be fooled and deceived by other false belief systems.
Mainstream Protestant and Evangelical denominations were first to compromise their faith in Christ to appease the world, but the Catholic Church post-Vatican II under Pope Francis is trying to catch up. This is what we see today in the Catholic Church.
Jesus and the World
Jesus described this:
“If the world hate you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
Gospel of John 15:18-19:
“If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”
John 15:20
“You shall be hated all men for my name’s sake.”
Matthew 10:22
In this world is sin and stress. In Christ there is peace.
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33
Pope Francis is not an Evangelist
The mission of the Church is to challenge the world, not to accommodate the Church to the world.
Jesus warned the Pharisees, and by implication heretical priests who pervert the Gospel to appeal to the world:
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”
Matthew 23:1
These clergy, from priests to popes, who try to be liked by the secular world will never reach the unbelieving atheist or pagan with Christ. How can they? These clergy have already compromised Christ and Catholic doctrine on the altar of secular culture, on the world’s terms. Why should the world then turn to Christ?
They are giving the secular world excuses to turn away from God.
If they apologize for the words of Christ, how sincere is their belief in Christ?
Pope Gregory XVI, in 1832 said in his Encyclical On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism,
“Now We consider another abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained. Surely, in so clear a matter, you will drive this deadly error far from the people committed to your care. With the admonition of the apostle that “there is one God, one faith, one baptism”.”
Francis I wrote in Sep 2013:
“First of all, you ask if the God of the Christians forgives those who do not believe and do not seek faith. Given that, and this is fundamental, God’s mercy has no limits if he who asks for mercy does so in contrition and with a sincere heart, the issue for those who do not believe in God is in obeying their own conscience. In fact, listening and obeying it, means deciding about what is perceived to be good or to be evil. The goodness or the wickedness of our behavior depends on this decision.”
Catholic Morals
Catholic morals are firmly based on Scripture. Their foundation is solid. Cultural morals change from age to age, like fashions.
Pope Francis thinks otherwise
“Non-Christians, by God’s gracious initiative, when they are faithful to their own consciences, can live ‘justified by the grace of God’, and thus be ‘associated to the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ”
Evangelii Gaudium, November, 2013
According to Pope Francis, the individual decides what is morally right or wrong according to what the individual thinks or feels. This contradicts Jesus’ teaching, the reason Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and what the Catholic Church has stood for in the last 2,000 years. This was the sin in the Garden of Eden.
The prophet Isaiah wrote (Isaiah 5:20):
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
“Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good. … Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”
Pope Francis I, quoted in Huffinton Post
“I do not approach the relationship in order to proselytize, or convert the atheist; I respect him… nor would I say that his life is condemned, because I am convinced that I do not have the right to make a judgment about the honesty of that person… every man is the image of God, whether he is a believer or not.“
Pope Francis: On Heaven and Earth 2, pp. 12-13
Respecting an atheist is a good thing. Accepting the atheist’s belief is a different thing altogether. Pope Francis might have read the Bible, but he obviously has not understood what is written there.
“… promote religious freedom for everyone, everyone! Every man and every woman must be free in his or her profession of religion, whatever it may be.”
Pope Francis: Address in St. Peter’s Square, May 18, 2013:
To sum it up
Describing a meeting in Poland in September 2017, Pope Francis is quoted as saying:
“On one of my trips, World Youth Day in Poland [Krakow 2016], during a lunch with 15 young people and the Archbishop, one of them asked me: ‘What can I tell my young friend who is an atheist, who does not believe, what reasoning can I use?’. And it struck me how to reply: ‘Look, the last thing you must do is say anything’. He just stared at me.”
L’Osservatore Romano, Sep 22, 2017
I am at a loss for words.