Rome, March 17, 2015: It was and is the will of Our Lord Jesus Christ that all who come to Him with faith and repentance receive the Mercy and forgiveness of God, and He won these great gifts for all mankind by His most bloody death on the Cross.  But He established a prerequisite for every man, woman, or child who would come to Him, to receive these gifts:  namely, faith and penance.  It was with this exhortation, that He began His public ministry, when He said, “The time is accomplished, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent, and believe the gospel.“ (Mk 1:15).  For many Christians, who revere the Bible as the source of their faith, these may only be nice sounding words, but for the Catholic Church, which Christ Founded, these words are both an exhortation unto the end of time and the very form and practice of our Holy Religion.+

The Path of true Repentance & Faith which Christ taught

When a man recognizes that he is a sinner, he comes to Christ by confessing his sins and professing His faith in the Lord Jesus, as God and his Redeemer. He accepts Christ’s teaching as a whole, that is entirely and in every respect, and he submits to the authority of Christ which He handed down, in part, to the Apostles and through them to all the Bishops and priests of His Church.  To be incorporated into Christ, therefore, a sinner must present himself to a Catholic priest and receive Baptism, making a profession of faith in Christ and His teachings, and repenting of all his sins.  He shows publicly that he is sincere in his repentance by removing himself from the public profession of sin, which consists in those forms or lifestyles which are contrary to the Gospel.  Thus, drunkards give up drink and remove it from their homes; fornicators give up fornication, adulterers leave their lovers, sodomites give up their sodomy and its lifestyle, etc.

For Catholics, who have fallen away from the practice of the Faith, and have entered into sinful relations, such as marrying one who is already married but separated or divorced, or cohabiting with anyone, the return to the practice of the Faith requires this same repentance and faith, separation from the life of sin and reception of the Sacrament of Confession. Then one can receive the Eucharist.  In the Catholic Church, we take the Sacraments seriously, because we believe just as Our Lord taught us, that in the Eucharist there is really, truly and substantially the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Most High and Holy God of Israel, the Eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ, before whom, even in Christ, no one is worthy to come, unless he repent and believe, but by Whose mercy and grace a man is made worthy to receive in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, if he repent of his sins and believe the entirety (not just what he picks and chooses) of the Gospel.

This is the discipline and faith which the Catholic Church has received from Our Lord Himself, through the Apostles, and from the Apostles through the very men they chose for Bishops and priests (presbyters), and through these down through the ages. Our teachings and disciplines have never changed, because they are not ours, but Christs, and our Church, the Catholic Church is not ours, but Christ’s.  The Catholic Church, therefore, being the one of which Christ said:  And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against her. (Matthew 16:18), knows that this Faith which Christ gave her is her victory over the world, the flesh and Satan; to alter that Faith therefore, would be to succumb to the world, the flesh and Satan. This is what we have always believed, this is what Christ and the Apostles have taught, and not only to us, but to all the world.

A HOMILY WHICH CONVICTS THE POPE OF OPEN SCHISM WITH CHRIST

Thus, it was an incredible and shameless act of defiance to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, when Pope Francis preached this blasphemous sermon, this morning, at Mass.  Here is the Italian text of that sermon from Radio Vaticana:

“Un uomo – una donna – che si sente malato nell’anima, triste, che ha fatto tanti sbagli nella vita, a un certo momento sente che le acque si muovono, c’è lo Spirito Santo che muove qualcosa, o sente una parola o… ‘Ah, io vorrei andare!’… E prende coraggio e va. E quante volte oggi nelle comunità cristiane trova le porte chiuse: ‘Ma tu non puoi, no, tu non puoi. Tu hai sbagliato qui e non puoi. Se vuoi venire, vieni alla Messa domenica, ma rimani lì, ma non fare di più’. E quello che fa lo Spirito Santo nel cuore delle persone, i cristiani con psicologia di dottori della legge distruggono”.

La Chiesa è casa di Gesù
“A me fa dispiacere questo”, afferma subito dopo Francesco. Che ribadisce: la Chiesa ha sempre le porte aperte:

“E’ la casa di Gesù e Gesù accoglie. Ma non solo accoglie, va a trovare la gente come è andato a trovare questo. E se la gente è ferita, cosa fa Gesù? La rimprovera perché è ferita? No, viene e la porta sulle spalle. E questa si chiama misericordia. E quando Dio rimprovera il suo popolo – ‘Misericordia voglio, non sacrificio!’ – parla di questo”.

The link above contains the full audio of the homily.

Here is our unofficial English translation, of the citation we just made:

“A man, a woman, who feels bad at heart, sad, who has made so many mistakes in life, at a certain moment feels the waters move, it is the Holy Spirit who moves something, or he hears a word, o, “Ah, I would want to go!” … and he gets the courage and goes.  And how many times, today, in the christian community he finds the doors shut:  “But you cannot, no, you cannot.  You have made a mistake here and you cannot.  If you want to come, come to Mass on Sunday, but remain there, don’t do anything else.”  And that which the Holy Spirit is working in the heart of these persons, Christians with the mentality of doctors of the law, destroy”.

The Church is the House of Jesus
“This displeases me,” Francis affirms immediately afterwards.  He repeats:  the Church always has her doors open:

“She is the house of Jesus and Jesus is there welcoming.  But not only welcoming, he goes to find the people just as he went and found this one.  And if the people are wounded, what does Jesus do? Does he reprove them because they are wounded? No, he comes and carries them on his shoulders.  And this is called, “mercy”. And when God reproves His people — “I want mercy, not sacrifice!” — He is speaking of this”.

Analysis

The context of the Pope’s talk is about receiving communion. And anyone with the simplest Catholic education can understand that what the pope is doing is denouncing the discipline of reserving the Eucharist for those not in mortal sin, which discipline comes from the Apostles and is universal in all the local Churches which they founded (Jerusalem, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, etc.).

Notice, that there is not 1 word about how the sinner is guilty of a moral offense:  in the pope’s mind, the sinner is just 1 who made “mistakes”, and thus has no need to repent, to change his life, and to remove scandal, or to go to confession, before receiving the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.  NO! Its the faithful Catholics, who remind him that unless he do this, he cannot receive the Eucharist, but can attend Mass, to pray for the grace of conversion: it is they who have the “mentality” of the pharisees, it is they who destroy the working of the Holy Spirit in these sinners — a most blasphemous and unjust assertion!

Not to mention, an interpretation contrary to 2000 years of faith.

But no, Francis will have none of this!  He wants the “doors open” to all, without regard to the necessity of first believing (faith) and converting (penance).

In a word, the Pope just attacked Apostolic Tradition as it regards the discipline of refusing Communion to those in grave sin.  That is heresy!  And such a sin is condemned by the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicea, held in 787 A. D., in its 4th anathema:

If anyone should despise any written or unwritten ecclesiastical tradition, let him be anathema!

The Pope’s homily is also a formal violation of the teaching of the Council of Trent, Session 13, canon XI (bold facing added):

CANON XI: If any one saith, that faith alone is a sufficient preparation for receiving the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist; let him be anathema. And for fear lest so great a sacrament may be received unworthily, and so unto death and condemnation, this holy Synod ordains and declares, that sacramental confession, when a confessor may be had, is of necessity to be made beforehand, by those whose conscience is burdened with mortal sin, howsoever contrite they may think themselves. But if any one shall presume to teach, preach, or obstinately to assert, or even in public disputation to defend the contrary, he shall be thereupon excommunicated.

Thus, this homily of the Pope can serve as formal, canonical evidence of his heresy.  If the College of Cardinals, whose duty now is to rebuke him, remain silent and allow him to issue no retraction, they are also guilty of a grave sin against fraternal and filial charity. If he persists, after 2 or 3 corrections, then they are obliged gravely before God to depose him from the papacy, as a heretic and schismatic.

The pope’s reinterpretation of Scripture, this morning, is nothing short of a sacrilege: the imputation to a text from Scripture which is entirely at odds with its signification and proper meaning, and this, to foster the approval of sin, the condoning of sin by false mercy.

For it is mercy to preach repentance to sinners, as Our Lord commanded St. Peter and the Apostles, when He ascended into Heaven.  It is false mercy to preach acceptance of sinners without repentance and faith, since that leaves them in the state of sin in which they merit eternal damnation and temporal punishments.

Pope Francis evidently thinks that he is God

And that the infallible and indefectible Church of God, which is the Catholic Church alone, is wrong. And that she has been wrong for 2000 years,* to require both faith and penance of any sinner, before allowing them to receive Jesus Christ in the Sacrament.

What the pope is doing is committing the sins of heresy, blasphemy and sacrilege of scripture all at once.

This is NOT HUMILITY, this is DIABOLIC PRIDE.  It is also an act of schism with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

To say that what God said in the Old Testament, “It is mercy I desire and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6; cf. Mt. 9:16), applies to abandoning the requirements of faith and penance, which God’s Only Begotten Son established as the prerequisites of Christian worship, when He said, “The time is accomplished, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent, and believe the gospel.“ (Mk 1:15),° is a plain and simple and direct denial of the authority of God the Son, and a usurpation by himself of the prerogatives of the Messiah, the Christ, to establish the limits of the faith!

Such a sin is a work of the Antichrist.

____________________

+ The original article did not contain these first 4 paragraphs, since those who read this blog are devout Catholics. But due to the publicity this article has drawn, the editor has added them to explain the context of what follows even to non-Catholics and show why what the Pope did at mass, on Tuesday, was and is such a scandal.

* For citations from the new Catechism, see the comments below.

°  St. Peter the Apostle, shows that this is to be understood of the Sacraments, when he preached on Pentecost day, saying:  But “Do penance, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins: and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 2:38), where he shows the necessity of penance and faith prior to receiving the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation.  Since, the Christian Faith, is not a Pharisaical religion of external observances, but a spiritual one, the spiritual requirements for 1 sacrament are the spiritual requirements for all the sacraments. Thus faith and penance (repentance) is required most of all for the Eucharist, which is the supreme Sacrament of communion with God.