Has the Catholic Church Lost Its Focus?

Has the has the Catholic Church lost its focus? The following article, which was part of a reading assignment in my Old Testament Theology class seems to suggest that.  

https://onepeterfive.com/gaia-church-love-the-earth-heaven-can-wait/

While I agree with the author that Pope Francis is not  the Anti-Christ, I also agree that he could do so much more to focus on eternal things such as getting to heaven and less on the temporal and transient things. 

To often, I think that there is a related problem.  I also strongly believe that Pope Francis and even some of our  bishops are too worried about politics and not enough about getting people to heaven.  I honestly think that they try too hard not to be a church of "no". They are afraid to point out our sins such as homosexuality and abortion,  maybe because the people in the pews are experiencing those things. Instead of pointing out those sins,  I think that too often they look the other way when  Catholic politicians are not faithful and support those sins. The focus should be on getting to heaven.  We do that by repenting of our sins and asking for forgiveness, not by sweeping them under the carpet and hoping that nobody notices them. 

Back in June about 6 weeks before President Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, I sent the following letter to Archbishop Cardinal Gregory,  the  Archbishop of the Diocese of Washington DC, calling him out for looking the other way when,  Biden, a Catholic supported abortion and transgenderism.  

                 June  7, 2024

His Eminence 

Wilton Cardinal Gregory 

Archbishop of Washington DC 

PO Box 29260

Washington, DC 20017-0260

Your Eminence,  

I am a 5th Grade PSR (CCD)  teacher in the Diocese of Wichita. 

When we studied the Sacrament of the Eucharist,  the following questions came up...  

"For what reason should a Catholic not receive Communion? Why is this appropriate? What must a person in this state do in order to receive Communion again?"

The answer that our workbook contained was...

"Because they are in a state of mortal sin. If we are in the state of mortal sin and receive the Eucharist, we commit sacrilege, treating a sacred object unworthily, as if we don't care. Confession restores grace to the soul and purifies the soul for the Eucharist."

That goes with what Cannon 915 teaches...

"Can. 915 ...and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion."

What should I tell my students when they find out that you don't actually enforce this? In fact, you look the other way when Catholic politicians obstinately support abortion, same sex marriage, contraception use, and transgenderism.  

What am I talking about?  President Biden who ran for President on a pro abortion platform. The record shows that he is the most pro abortion president ever. Most recently at State of the Union he invoked the name of God when he said...

"My God, what freedom else would you take away?"

Then he made a promise to restore Roe v. Wade when he said... "If you — if you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again."   

More recently he declared Easter Sunday to be "Transgender Day of Visibility."  During a recent pro abortion rally in Florida,  Biden blessed himself making the Sign of the Cross (What a slap in the face.) and then doubled down on his promise to make abortion the law of the land.  He has also campaigned with the promise to reinstate the Contraception mandates, and is also requiring any insurer or physician receiving federal financial assistance to cover or provide sex-reassignment surgeries and therapies on the grounds that refusal to do so would constitute discrimination based on sex. 

And your response, Cardinal Gregory...

To go on the CBS news show  "Face the Nation " and assert 

that President Joe Biden “picks and chooses” elements of the Catholic faith to follow, that he is “sincere” in his faith but he refuses to engage with some of the “challenging” aspects of it. 

Did you go far enough? Probably not. You could do more.  

In May 2022, Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone decided to bar Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from Communion in the San Francisco Archdiocese. Cordileone invoked canon 915 writing that a "Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others. 

Your silence and inaction are scandalous.  

You have two jobs here:

1. You must protect the Sanctity of the Holy Eucharist.  By looking  the other way, you bring scandal upon yourself and upon the Church.  That's because Biden  is obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin by supporting procured abortion. Jesus didn't look the other way when he told a woman accused of adultery: He told her... "Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more."

What are faithful Catholics sitting in the pews supposed to think when you look the other way? What are faithful Catholics supposed to think when you ingore Cannon Law? 

Can they "pick and choose" what they want to believe? Looks like they are already doing that!

While the Catholic Church itself holds that abortion is wrong and should not be legal, 6 in 10 U.S. adult Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a newly released profile of Catholicism by Pew Research.

Pew reports that many U.S. Catholics would welcome more change. Some 83% say they want the church to allow the use of contraception, 69% say priests should be allowed to get married, 64% say women should be allowed to become priests, and 54% say the Catholic Church should recognize same-sex marriage. No wonder only one third of Catholics believe in the Real Presence.  What are they supposed to think when the leaders of their church fail to defend the Eucharist? 

2. Your other job is to get to heaven and take as many people who you can with you. How are Biden (and all of those other Catholics who are picking and choosing) supposed to get to heaven when they are allowed to receive Holy Communion while in a state of mortal sin? Are they  committing sacrilege as my workbook suggests? 

What a teaching moment, Cardinal Gregory! You need to do the same thing  that Nancy Pelosi's Archbishop did with her. Invoke Cannon 915. Once Biden has made a good Confession and  promised to avoid the near occasion of sin, he could  receive Communion again.  

In the meantime,  what am I supposed to tell my 5th graders?

Sincerely,  

Terry Brennan 

President Trump is not the Anti-Christ

During the run up to the presidential election this past fall  a Catholic friend of mine accused President Trump of being the Ant-Christ.  Here's what I told him. 

The Ant-Christ?  Really? You have to be kidding me. You sure do take a lot of liberties.  You sure do make a lot of false assumptions.  You sound like a liberal.  They tend to put false labels on people.  You might not like President Trump and he might have done some evil things in his life, but doing evil things  doesn't make a person to be the Ant-Christ.  Do you really know anything about the Anti-Christ? Obviously he didn't. It is important that if people are going to throw labels around they should understand them and know what they mean.  

Here's a talk by Fr Chris Alar from the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. This is one of two places where I go when I have questions about what Catholics believe. Here's a talk by him about the Ant-Christ that you might want to watch. I suggest that you watch the whole thing before you comment.  You might learn something.  

https://www.youtube.com/live/t85obRrSLQE?si=XYm-fa5f6vFluMpp 

Fr Alar tells us that there are four Bible verses that refer to the Ant-Christ.  

1 John 2:18-19

18 Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that the antichrist 

was coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. Thus we know this is the last hour.

19 They went out from us, but they were not really of our number;* if they had been, they would have remained with us. Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number.

Father tells us that that he's talking about people who have left the faith.  Those are Anti-Christ.  He's talking about apostates: people who have left the Christian faith.  They are apostate Christians because he says, " they  went out from us."   The Catechism of the Catholic Church  defines apostasy as "the total repudiation of the Christian faith;"

2089 Incredulity is the neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to assent to it. "Heresy is the obstinate   faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same; apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith; schism is the refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him."11

This article from EWTN tells us...

"The same is true of apostasy. The person who leaves not just the Catholic Church but who abandons Christ Himself is materially an apostate. He is formally an apostate through willful, and therefore culpable, repudiation of the Christian faith."

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/answers/heresy-shism-and-apostasy-24761

1 John 2:22-23

22 Who is the liar? Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist.

23 No one who denies the Son has the Father, but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well.

Fr Alar tells us that this is why we profess at every Mass,  The Father, The Son,  and The Holy Spirit.  This is consistent the apostate nature of the many  antichrists.  For they have denied that Jesus is the Christ and in denying the Son, they have implicitly denied the Father.  

1 John 4:3

3 and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God. This is the spirit of the antichrist that, as you heard, is to come, but in fact is already in the world

This spirit does not acknowledge God. Father tells us that the spirit had already been in the world from the beginning because sin entered the world but there will be coming the main Ant-Christ at the end.  

2 John  1:7

Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh; such is the deceitful one and the antichrist.

Father tells us that this clarifies the specific deception being perpetrated by the spirit of the Ant-Christ and its human collaborator, the one who is to come suggesting that it involves a denial of Jesus in the flesh.  He goes on to tell us the beast, who you also mention, best understood and its initial, literal fulfillment as one of the early Roman emperors. 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church  talks about this.  There are often multiple fulfillments of a single prophecy the Beast also may point forward to an individual at the end of time is also possibly correct such an individual is easy to identify when we turn to Paul who calls him the "man of lawlessness" who appears to be a future individual who does things like the Roman emperors did in the past,  will one day manifest himself in the temple in Jerusalem, and want to be worshipped such as Caligula. He was a prerveted one claiming to be God.   He attempted to have an image of himself put in the Jerusalem temple The many anti Christ's are identified as apostate Christians meaning they rejected God the Father and the Son. 

CCC 2113 Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc. Jesus says, "You cannot serve God and mammon." Many martyrs died for not adoring "the Beast" refusing even to simulate such worship. Idolatry rejects the unique Lordship of God; it is therefore incompatible with communion with God.

Father goes on to explain that future antichrists may also becan apostate Christian or at least from an apostate family.  Future emperor like individuals may have a personal family or national Christian background that went apostate. The Roman emperors were Pagans.  Apostate is the most serious sin. You completely reject God.  The Church Fathers identify the anti Christ as the man of lawlessness in Paul.  They understood him to be a political ruler who would oppose the Church, rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and demand to be worshipped as God. He was understood to be a person of Jewish ancestry from the now lost tribe of Dan.

There is no infallible consensus. It isn't dogma. There are speculative theological viewpoints, but none has been the final anti Christ, the final persecutor of the church. the Catechism explaines that there will be a superior supreme  religious deception before the second coming of Christ, and that supreme form of deception is that of the anti Christ Matthew 24:15.  There will be false Christs that will lead the elect astray.

Father defines the "apostasy from the truth" as...

• Life is not sacred 

• Redefining marriage 

• A girl can be a boy 

• A boy can be a girl 

CCC 675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh. 

CCC 677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.

What's obvious by the Biblical definition, there's no way that Trump is the Anti-Christ. When is the last time that you heard him reject the Christian faith? When is the last time you heard him fail to acknowledge Jesus Christ? Have you ever heard him deny Jesus Christ? Have you ever heard him reject God? You may not like him but I've never heard him, do those things. And he's never glorified himself in place of God. Those are characteristics of the Ant-Christ.  

The only thing close in American politics to the Biblical definition of Anti-Christ that I've seen was at 2012 Democrat Convention when they voted to deny God three times from their platform.  

https://youtu.be/YtKd005fxnM?si=X42JmhCt2NF4s12-