By Christopher A. Ferrara
April 22, 2017
Fatima Perspectives
Meet Father James F. Keenan, SJ, another of the Modernist Jesuit sophists that Pope Bergoglio, the first and only Jesuit Pope, has unleashed upon the Church to declare the supposed New Age of Mercy that began with Bergoglio’s arrival from Argentina.
In 2003, Keenan, who teaches what passes for theology at Boston College, infamously testified against the adoption of an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution that would have defined marriage as a “stable union between a man and a woman.” His testimony before the State Legislature was a tissue of deception. As George Weigel summarizes:
“Fr. Keenan argued that a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the stable union of a man and a woman offended Catholic social justice principles and ought to be rejected. In the course of his testimony, Fr. Keenan also misrepresented the teaching of the American bishops, appealed to a theologically dubious magisterium of theologians, failed to tell the legislators the Massachusetts bishops’ position [in favor] on H.3190, and neglected to inform the legislators of recent, authoritative Vatican statements on the subject — all of which created the impression among legislators that justice required the rejection of any legal definition of ‘marriage’ as the stable union of a man and a woman.”
Today, Keenan, ever the cunning sophist, is pleased to announce that on account of “Easter dynamism, that call to see things new” we can rejoice that Amoris Laetitia (AL) “brilliantly brings the tradition into the present, for the sake of the future. Our tradition must always develop, as the great theologian Marie Dominique Chenu taught; otherwise we cannot bear it into the future.”
Chenu, like Keenan today, was a leading Modernist subversive condemned by Rome and removed from his theological teaching post in the 1940s under Pope Pius XII. Like Keenan, he promoted the Modernist arch-heresy of the “evolution of dogma” according to which dogma does not change, but over time the Church’s understanding of it does. Which is just the sophist’s way of saying that dogma changes.
AL, Keenan exults, is “a turning point… born out of the work of two synods where Church leaders similarly wrestled, argued, bickered, and fought about the current state of Catholic marriage and the need for a pastoral response to the lives of those who are married.”
That’s a laugh. As anyone who followed the rigged Synod proceedings would know, AL had nothing to do with the Synod except to the extent that the Synod provided cover for the issuance of AL. Francis was going to publish AL no matter what the Synod “decided,” and indeed despite the Synod majority’s clear opposition to his master plan to admit public adulterers — or more precisely bigamists — in “second marriages” to Holy Communion.
Keenan, quoting Cardinal Kasper, one of the leading Modernist sophists of the Bergoglian epoch, exults that AL “doesn’t change anything of church doctrine or of canon law – but it changes everything.” Nothing is changed, but everything is changed. Which is just the sophist’s way of saying that everything is changed — as if that were possible when it comes to the Church’s infallible teaching on the moral law and her intrinsically related discipline, which not even a Pope can alter.
Naturally, Keenan trumpets the latest sophistical buzz-word in the post-Vatican II lexicon: “discernment,” which originates precisely in AL. Here Keenan cites AL, ¶ 303 for the proposition that would mean the end of the moral law in practice:
“[C]onscience can do more than recognize that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal.”
In other words, each Catholic can decide whether God wishes him to obey the negative precept of the natural law that “thou shalt not commit adultery” and can even decide that God is pleased with his or her decision to avoid obedience “for now.”
Father Keenan poses the obvious question in light of ¶ 303: “Does this mean that the Catholic conscience is now [!] free to ignore church teaching?” Here is his purely sophistical, which is to say deceptive, answer about “now” — i.e., under Pope Bergoglio — versus “then” — i.e., under every Pope before him:
“No. But one has to ask how much of church teaching directly dictates the regular decisions of the Catholic conscience. The church guides us on some issues of parenting and married life, but the day to day living out of that vocation depends on the active conscientious discernment of what is best for one’s child, marriage or family.”
In other words, Keenan’s ‘No’ actually means ‘Yes’. According to him, thanks solely to AL it is now up to each Catholic to decide how much of Church teaching actually governs his “day to day living” and whether “what is best for one’s child, marriage and family” is not to follow the moral law in given circumstances. As if the mere invocation of the phrase “day to day living” somehow changes the application of exceptionless moral norms that apply every day and in every life situation.
The Church is now suffering under the reign of sophists who are laboring to demolish the moral edifice of the Church on the authority of a document which — one must say it in candor — is itself a monument to sophistry, written precisely to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ at the same time so as to allow its author and his circle of collaborators to affirm what they are really denying, while denying what they are really affirming.
It seems that now only God can deliver the Church from their clutches by a most dramatic intervention from on high. That intervention will undoubtedly involve the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
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