Pope Admits Mistakes in Letter to Bishops

Source: New York Times

MADRID — Pope Benedict XVI has written an unusually personal letter to bishops worldwide explaining why he revoked the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop and admitting mistakes in how the Vatican handled the case.

The letter, which the Vatican will release Thursday, is a further attempt to calm the waters after Benedict pardoned four schismatic bishops, including Richard Williamson, who in a television interview aired in January said that there were no Nazi gas chambers.

The revocation provoked worldwide outrage and caused Catholics and Jews alike to question Benedict’s commitment to ecumenism and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

In passages of the letter that appeared on Wednesday in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, the Vatican admitted “mistakes” in handling the case, and said in the future it would pay more attention to how news spreads over the Internet.




Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/europe/12pope.html?_r=1&hp

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It's official. The papacy is NOT "infallible".

Of course the Hitler Youth is going to side with the Nazis.

...that "infallibility" only applies to ex cathedra pronouncements, whatever that means. It doesn't mean, at any rate, that the Pope is never wrong. (This "core doctrine" goes back only to the late 19th century, BTW.)

So the holocaust-denying bishop is out, but the rabidly antisemitic order he belongs to is still dandy, I take it.

In practice, popes seldom use their power of infallibility, but rely on the notion that the Church allows the office of the pope to be the ruling agent in deciding what will be accepted as formal beliefs in the church."<2> Since the solemn declaration of Papal Infallibility by Vatican I on July 18, 1870, this power has been used only once ex cathedra: in 1950 when Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption of Mary as being an article of faith for Roman Catholics. Prior to the solemn definition of 1870, Pope Pius IX, with the support of the overwhelming majority of Roman Catholic bishops, had proclaimed Immaculate Conception an ex cathedra dogma in December 1854.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_Infallibility

As you can see it has rarely been done, and then only after a lot of debate on that issue. Abortion re-definition as Murder in 1869 (at the same Council as Ex Cathedra was made official) was and is NOT Ex Cathedra even in the Catholic Church (Through the Catechism says the definition of Abortion as Murder if NOT a debatable point, the dogma has never been made an Ex Cathedra rule of the Pope).

In other words, unless the Pope switches on his infallibility powers before speaking, he's not ACTUALLY infallible.

But don't quote me on that. I stopped drinking the kool-aid altar wine 30 years ago.

Pretty much right after I cashed the checks I got for my Confirmation.

to award himself the powers of God.

No one with half a brain cell would ever swallow that shit. I went to Catholic schools, went to a Catholic boarding school for high school (although I only had to live there for a year). The smart girls, the ones where when you looked them in the eyes you could see there was someone home, they didn't swallow that nonsense any more than I did.

before that power consolidation it was considered an attack on the Pope to say he can never be wrong.

to award himself the powers and attributes of God.

No one with half a brain cell would ever swallow that shit. I went to Catholic schools, went to a Catholic boarding school for high school (although I only had to live there for a year). The smart girls, the ones where when you looked them in the eyes you could see there was someone home, they didn't swallow that nonsense any more than I did.

It only applies when the Pope speaks "ex cathedra". It's happened maybe a half dozen times in the history of that institution.

Like the time last year when he predicted The Jersey Devils would win The Stanley Cup.

The rest of the time, he's just popeing it old school.

Nice of him to apologise to his bishops: now how about apologising to the rest of us?

Are you KIDDING?

There's nothing he would like more than to do away with both. Given half a chance he'd probably start a new crusade against protestants, too.

This guy is SOOO 14th century.

even though he was a major figure in creating the VII reforms. Since then he wants a more conservative, old style approach which the SSPX fits in.

But also in how to promptly admit and correct them. Pope Benedict XVI is demonstrating great leadership in this. How many sins have been perpetuated and protected in the name of papal infallibility? I see how there can be much less of that in the future.

After that, and the deep history of virulent antisemitism, it's anybody's guess as to why people stay Catholic.

ex cathedra. :think: