I have to admit, it’s kind of cool to have a handy rhetorical toolkit which you can apply to anything and it still works. As long as you’re of a certain mindset, it just becomes a matter of fill-in-the blanks.
Ready? I’ll try it.
The term for this is “mercy”. The essential paragraph:
Stefan Hartmann’s letter to the Vatican, which he posted on his Facebook page, requested release from the traditional oath “in acknowledgement of my weaknesses and failures, with all due humility and after long consideration of my conscience and personal situation”.
He has been a father for 25 years and is 59 years old. This is mercy – to allow him to be released from celibacy. I like a Church of mercy.
No wonder people are doing this so much these days. It’s so easy. Hardly an ounce of thought or effort required.
This sounds familiar. Didn’t St. John XXIII and Paul the VI rehabilitate all the condemned dissidents so they could be periti at Vatican II? Perhaps Francis is gearing up for the Synod.
^ Eek! I’d like to know more about that.
Brian, do you mean De Lubac, Von Ballthasar, et. al.?
Here are four examples:
(1) In 1950 Pius XII issued Humane Generis in which he roundly condemned the teaching of the movement known as the Nouvelle Theologie. To this end, he concluded his instruction as follows: “For this reason, after mature reflexion and consideration before God, that We may not be wanting in Our sacred duty, We charge the Bishops and the Superiors General of Religious Orders, binding them most seriously in conscience, to take most diligent care that such opinions be not advanced in schools, in conferences or in writings of any kind, and that they be not taught in any manner whatsoever to the clergy or the faithful.”
This admonition notwithstanding, a number of prominent proponents this movement went on to become periti at the Council; those among them include Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Joseph Ratzinger. And although he died before the Council, Teilhard de Chardin, arguablly the founder of this movement, had his work condemned, first by the Jesuit Superior General in 1925, and then by the CDF in 1962 – the latter identifying serious errors noted to be offensive to Catholic doctrine. Nevertheless, during the 1960s he was rehabilitated by de Lubac, and has since been praised by both St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
(2) In 1954 under Pius XII, John Courtney Murray was ordered to cease writing and publishing on religious liberty. Nevertheless, he was later invited by Paul VI to participate in Vatican II where his previously condemned views on religious liberty became a part of Dignitatis Humanae.
These next two examples, while never receiving formal condemnation, nevertheless involve individuals who were removed from important positions of power by one Pope only to be rehabilitated by another.
(3) Just prior to the conciliar debates St. John the XXIII, for unknown reasons, removed Annibale Bugnini from his position as Secretary of the Conciliar Liturgical Commission; at this time, Bugnini was also dismissed from his chair at the Pontifical Lateran University. However, despite this, in 1964, Paul VI appointed Bugnini as the Secretary of the Consilium (the Commission for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Liturgy).
(4) Without making him a Cardinal, Pius XII removed Giovanni Montini (soon to be Paul VI) from the head of the Vatican State Department, and instead appointed him as Archbishop of Milan – Milan having historically always been a cardinalatial see. However, Montini was subsequently made a Cardinal by St. John XXIII in 1958, and was then brought back to the Vatican and appointed to the Council’s Central Preparatory Committee in 1961.
The first two examples, in particular, reminded me of what Pope Francis has recently done with Fr. Fagan; especially considering the fact that the formerly condemned cleric wrote so glowingly about admitting divorced and “remarried” Catholics to Holy Communion.